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: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
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
V‑Retrver is an evidence‑driven retrieval framework that treats universal multimodal retrieval as an agentic reasoning process grounded in visual inspection. It allows multimodal large language models to selectively acquire visual evidence through external tools, alternating between hypothesis generation and targeted visual verification. The approach is trained with a curriculum that blends supervised activation, rejection‑based refinement, and reinforcement learning, achieving an average 23.0% improvement in retrieval accuracy across multiple benchmarks.
By Dongyang Chen, Chaoyang Wang, Dezhao Su, Xi Xiao, Zeyu Zhang, Jing Xiong, Qing Li, Yuzhang Shang, Shichao Kan
arXiv:2606. 26458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over knowledge graphs has emerged as a promising approach for grounding large language models, yet existing benchmarks largely overlook the challenges of retrieval in multimodal knowledge graph RAG (MKG-RAG).
By Xiaochen Wang, Bao Hoang, Han Liu, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma
UMER is a Unified Multimodal Embedding and Ranking framework that combines contrastive embeddings with Pair‑Aware Discriminative Reasoning to improve universal multimodal retrieval. It replaces item‑wise reflection with pair‑wise comparison of query–candidate pairs, enabling explicit identification of matching and discrepancy evidence. A mutual distillation strategy transfers reliable pairwise preferences between the embedding and ranking components, and UMER achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the MMEB‑V2 benchmark while supporting budget‑adjustable inference.
By Libiao Chen, Xiyang Liu, Yanheng Wei, Tao Wang, Zhenyu Tang
arXiv:2508.13186v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: AI agents with advanced reasoning and tool-use capabilities have demonstrated impressive performance in web browsing for deep search. However...
By Shilong Li, Xingyuan Bu, Wenjie Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Jun Dong, Haoyang He, Hao Lu, Haozhe Zhang, Chenchen Jing, Zhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Jiayi Tian, Chenchen Zhang, Tianhao Peng, Yancheng He, Jihao Gu, Hui Huang, Donghao Zhou, Yuanxing Zhang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Qiangpeng Yang, Shilei Wen
arXiv:2604. 04969v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing systems struggle with complex cross-modal reasoning.
By Sijun Dai, Qiang Huang, Xiaoxing You, Jun Yu
arXiv:2608. 15056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems often rely on long unstructured contexts or aggressively expanded evidence graphs, which can introduce noisy evidence, weaken multi-hop reasoning, and increase unsupported generation.
By Zafar Ali, Asad Khan, Aalia Malik, Pavlos Kefalas
arXiv:2605.16638v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that Universal Multimodal Embedding (UME) benefits significantly from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In this pa...
By Jianpeng Cheng, Xian Wu, Jiangfan Zhang, Wentao Bao, Chaitanya Ahuja, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Xuanming Cui, Hanchao Yu, Yang Gao, Fan Xia, Haixing Dai, Frankie Yuan, Zihao Wang, Xiaobing Chen, Qi Guo, Shaodan Zhai, Aashu Singh, Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao
arXiv:2607. 20517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over heterogeneous PDF collections remains challenging due to multimodal content, domain-specific terminology, and the need for multi-hop reasoning across dispersed evidence.
By Takato Yasuno
arXiv:2604. 09552v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Engineering rulebooks and technical standards contain multimodal information like dense text, tables, and illustrations that are challenging for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems.
By Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, Hoang Anh Nguyen, Anna C. Doris, Amir Mohammad Vahedi, Daniele Grandi, Faez Ahmed, Hongyi Xu