Preprint Open access
Visual Orchestration Tax in Agentic VLM Pipelines: Auditing and Certifying Visual Evidence Reuse
Agentic VLM pipelines increasingly pass the same static visual evidence through multiple specialist agents and tools. This design creates an orchestration-level redundancy mode: semantically unchanged images are repeatedly reconstructed as image-conditioned requests at the VLM API boundary. We call this phenomenon visu …