Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) streamlines long-document understanding by leveraging retrieval mechanisms to restrict input images to a highly curated subset. However, existing multimodal RAG pipelines primarily face two critical challenges: first, standard semantic similarity retrievers frequently fetch topically overlapping yet answer-void distractor pages that mislead downstream generation; second, rigid single-pass pipelines heavily depend on initial retrieval success, where any omission of core evidence inevitably causes cascading errors.
arXiv:2607. 24748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visually-rich documents such as reports, slides, and manuals often distribute the evidence needed to answer a question across multiple pages, mixing text with layout cues, tables, charts, and figures.
By Seonok Kim
arXiv:2608. 03292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long Document Visual Question Answering (LongDocVQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to locate, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous document elements distributed across multiple pages.
By Le Xiang, Zhicheng Guan, Hong Chen, Xiaocong Lin, Zhenghua Lei, Teng Hu, Bolei He, Long Zeng
arXiv:2609.05518v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Despite the strong capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their parametric knowledge remains incomplete and difficult to update, m...
By Jiacheng Cai, Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Huachi Zhou, Qinggang Zhang, Xiao Huang
arXiv:2608.30163v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-world knowledge resides in multimodal documents, necessitating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate question answering. However, ex...
By Ruofan Hu, Shengyang Xu, Minjie Hong, Xiaoda Yang, Sashuai Zhou, Ke Lei, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
arXiv:2604. 13731v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-page Document Visual Question Answering requires reasoning over semantics, layouts, and visual elements in long, visually dense documents.
By Yuanlei Zheng, Pei Fu, Hang Li, Ziyang Wang, Yuyi Zhang, Wenyu Ruan, Xiaojin Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Wei Chen, Xiang Bai
DocHop is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on integrated chart‑context reasoning within document‑style images. The benchmark presents narrative text that imposes multi‑step compositional constraints, while charts supply the data needed to answer questions grounded in semantic reference labels. It contains 2,074 examples across six task categories, generated via a stochastic logic‑first pipeline that controls reasoning depth and visual density, and shows a large performance gap between humans (over 90% accuracy) and the best models (62.83%).
By Zhuoran Yu, Le Thien Phuc Nguyen, Jaden Park, Xinyi Gu, Zexue He, Soochahn Lee, Rogerio Feris, Yong Jae Lee
arXiv:2608. 07067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-document understanding requires locating sparse and heterogeneous evidence across hundreds of pages, yet existing systems remain limited by static retrieval and fragile cross-round memory.
By Hanshu Yao, Janfeng Zhong, Niu Lian, Jinpeng Wang
arXiv:2606. 05749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative retrieval-reasoning agents have recently shown promise for multimodal long-document question answering.
By Kaifeng Chen, Hongtao Liu, Qiyao Peng, Jian Yang, Yongqiang Liu, Xiaochen Zhang, Qing Yang
The ICDAR2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains introduced a new Visual Question Answering benchmark that tests reasoning over documents from eight distinct domains such as business reports, scientific papers, and engineering drawings. Twenty valid submissions from eight teams were evaluated, featuring approaches ranging from zero‑shot vision‑language models to multi‑agent ensembles and fine‑tuned multimodal systems. Results indicate that the most effective systems employ structured evidence extraction, retrieval, verification, and orchestration across multiple components rather than single‑pass prompting.
By Artemis Llabr\'es, Marc Serra Ortega, Tom\`as Ockier, Samuel Ortega Cuadra, Amritpal Singh, Christos Georgakilas, Andrey Barsky, Ernest Valveny, Dimosthenis Karatzas
arXiv:2607. 22643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (mRAG) aims to answer image-text queries with external knowledge, but most existing systems still retrieve directly from raw multimodal input over a flat evidence space.
By Tianyu Yang, Shir Simon, Zhenzhen Li, Minhao Cheng, Xiangliang Zhang
arXiv:2606. 29648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Different retrievers, including lexical, semantic, and multimodal approaches, provide highly complementary strengths for multimodal document understanding, yet most systems combine them through fixed pipelines that cannot adapt to the demands of individual reasoning steps.
By Bohan Yao, Shruthan Radhakrishna, Vikas Yadav