arXiv AI

Text, Pixels, or Both? Evaluating Input Representations for Multimodal Document QA

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 1

Can Retrieval Heads See Images? Multimodal Retrieval Heads in Long-Context Vision-Language Models

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 AI
Jun 30

PIXELRAG: Web Screenshots Beat Text for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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 Computation and Language
Sep 23

ICDAR2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 9

One Token per Multimodal Evidence: Latent Memory for Resource-Constrained QA

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 AI
Jun 16

VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA

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
arXiv AI
Sep 2

MIDR: Enrichment-Augmented Indexing for Multimodal Document Retrieval

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