Multimodal LLMs can see a document, but they often can't read it reliably. Small text, tables, visual cues, and topological elements still trip them up under direct visual inference, even when the pag...
arXiv:2608. 19739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal LLMs can see a document, but they often can't read it reliably.
By Alin-Ionut Popa
arXiv:2608.22214v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In domain-specific multimodal long documents, images and text jointly convey complex knowledge that cannot be fully captured by plain text alone. Howev...
By Yikai Gao, Ding Xia, Xi Yang
arXiv:2605.27243v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large vision-language models increasingly rely on long-context modeling to reason over documents, hour-level videos, and long-horizon agent traject...
By Aaron Branson Cigres Li, Zhaowei Wang, Yu Zhao, Yiming Du, Haobo Li, Xiyu Ren, Ginny Wong, Simon See, Lishu Luo, Haodong Duan, Pasquale Minervini, Yangqiu Song
arXiv:2606. 28344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with retrieved web text has become a dominant paradigm, yet the web is not natively textual: existing systems depend on complex parsing pipelines that linearize HTML and discard layout, visual structure, and formatting.
By Yichuan Wang, Zhifei Li, Zirui Wang, Paul Teiletche, Lesheng Jin, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Sewon Min
arXiv:2604.27724v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Medical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically operate on text chunks extracted from biomedical literature, discarding the rich vis...
By Xupeng Chen, Binbin Shi, Chenqian Le, Jiaqi Zhang, Kewen Wang, Ran Gong, Jinhan Zhang, Chihang Wang
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:2606. 10572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: External memory effectively grounds large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs)-based question answering (QA) in relevant multimodal evidence.
By Zhi Zheng, Ziqiao Meng, Hao Luan, Wei Liu, Wee Sun Lee
External memory effectively grounds large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs)-based question answering (QA) in relevant multimodal evidence. However, existing memory paradigms represent each memory item in raw text and image forms, so retrieval-based systems must pass the retrieved text or images to the generation LLMs/VLMs, resulting in high token consumption and storage pressure, making it unaffordable for resource-constrained applications.
arXiv:2606. 16092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements.
By Young Rok Jang, Hyesoo Kong, Kyunghwan An, Jae Sub Huh, Gyeonghun Kim, Stanley Jungkyu Choi
MIDR (Multimodal Indexing for Document Retrieval) is a training‑free framework that enriches document indexes by converting rendered pages into verified textual fields with a multimodal LLM, then indexing those fields with BM25F and optionally fusing with dense retrieval. By shifting multimodal reasoning to index time, MIDR enables text‑centric serving while retaining multimodal evidence, achieving a 23.0% relative gain over BM25 on ViDoRe V3 and outperforming ColQwen2.5 on several domains with significantly smaller index memory and lower query latency.
By Debanjan Mahata, Atharva Tendle, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Yong Zhuang, Ozan Irsoy
arXiv:2606. 04240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval over visually-rich documents, pages that interleave text with figures, tables, and charts, is essential for multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, yet most retrievers still discard the visual channel.
By Jingbiao Mei