Orchestrator-Agent Trust: A Modular Agentic AI Visual Classification
  System with Trust-Aware Orchestration and RAG-Based Reasoning
Authors: name: Konstantinos I. Roumeliotis; name: Ranjan Sapkota; name: Manoj Karkee; name: Nikolaos D. Tselikas
Published: 2025-07-09 16:39:29

Abstract: Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly relies on multi-agent
architectures that blend visual and language understanding. Yet, a pressing
challenge remains: How can we trust these agents especially in zero-shot
settings with no fine-tuning? We introduce a novel modular Agentic AI visual
classification framework that integrates generalist multimodal agents with a
non-visual reasoning orchestrator and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
module. Applied to apple leaf disease diagnosis, we benchmark three
configurations: (I) zero-shot with confidence-based orchestration, (II)
fine-tuned agents with improved performance, and (III) trust-calibrated
orchestration enhanced by CLIP-based image retrieval and re-evaluation loops.
Using confidence calibration metrics (ECE, OCR, CCC), the orchestrator
modulates trust across agents. Our results demonstrate a 77.94\% accuracy
improvement in the zero-shot setting using trust-aware orchestration and RAG,
achieving 85.63\% overall. GPT-4o showed better calibration, while Qwen-2.5-VL
displayed overconfidence. Furthermore, image-RAG grounded predictions with
visually similar cases, enabling correction of agent overconfidence via
iterative re-evaluation. The proposed system separates perception (vision
agents) from meta-reasoning (orchestrator), enabling scalable and interpretable
multi-agent AI. This blueprint is extensible to diagnostics, biology, and other
trust-critical domains. All models, prompts, results, and system components
including the complete software source code are openly released to support
reproducibility, transparency, and community benchmarking at Github:
https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Orchestrator-Agent-Trust