FUSE : Failure-aware Usage of Subagent Evidence for MultiModal Search and Recommendation

Multimodal creative assistants decompose user goals and route tasks to subagents for layout, styling, retrieval, and generation. Retrieval quality is pivotal, yet failures can arise at several stages: understanding user intent, choosing content types, finding candidates (recall), or ranking results. Meanwhile, sending and processing images is costly, making naive multimodal approaches impractical. We present FUSE: Failure-aware Usage of Subagent Evidence for MultiModal Search and Recommendation. FUSE replaces most raw-image prompting with a compact Grounded Design Representation (GDR): a selection aware JSON of canvas elements (image, text, shape, icon, video, logo), structure, styles, salient colors, and user selection provided by the Planner team. FUSE implements seven context budgeting strategies: comprehensive baseline prompting, context compression, chain-of-thought reasoning, mini-shot optimization, retrieval-augmented context, two-stage processing, and zero-shot minimalism. Finally, a pipeline attribution layer monitors system performance by converting subagent signals into simple checks: intent alignment, content-type/routing sanity, recall health (e.g., zero-hit and top-match strength), and ranking displacement analysis. We evaluate the seven context budgeting variants across 788 evaluation queries from diverse users and design templates (refer Figure 3). Our systematic evaluation reveals that Context Compression achieves optimal performance across all pipeline stages, with 93.3% intent accuracy, 86.8% routing success(with fallbacks), 99.4% recall, and 88.5% NDCG@5. This approach demonstrates that strategic context summarization outperforms both comprehensive and minimal contextualization strategies.