Multiple Large AI Models’ Consensus for Object Detection—A Survey

The rapid development of large artificial intelligence (AI) models—large language models (LLMs), multimodel large language models (MLLMs) and vision–language models (VLMs)—has enabled instruction-driven visual understanding, where a single foundation model can recognize and localize arbitrary objects from natural-language prompts. However, predictions from individual models remain inconsistent—LLMs hallucinate nonexistent entities, while VLMs exhibit limited recall and unstable calibration compared to purpose-trained detectors. To address these limitations, a new paradigm termed “multiple large AI model’s consensus” has emerged. In this approach, multiple heterogeneous LLMs, MLLMs or VLMs process a shared visual–textual instruction and generate independent structured outputs (bounding boxes and categories). Next, their results are merged through consensus mechanisms. This cooperative inference improves spatial accuracy and semantic correctness, making it particularly suitable for generating high-quality training datasets for fast real-time object detectors. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the large multi-AI model’s consensus for object detection. We formalize the concept, review related literature on ensemble reasoning and multimodal perception, and categorize existing methods into four frameworks: prompt-level, reasoning-to-detection, box-level, and hybrid consensus. We further analyze fusion algorithms, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Finally, we discuss open challenges—vocabulary alignment, uncertainty calibration, computational efficiency, and bias propagation—and identify emerging trends such as consensus-aware training, structured reasoning, and collaborative perception ecosystems.