arXiv AI

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.

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
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
2d ago

LensVLM: Selective Context Expansion for Compressed Visual Representation of Text

LensVLM is an inference framework and post‑training recipe that lets Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) process compressed images of text by selectively expanding only the relevant parts back to full resolution. Using Qwen3.5‑9B‑Base, LensVLM achieves accuracy comparable to full‑text models at 4.3× compression and outperforms other compression baselines up to 10.1× across seven text QA benchmarks, while also improving performance on multimodal document and code tasks as compression increases.

By Roy Xie, Dan Friedman, Donghan Yu, Bowen Pan, Christopher Fifty, Jang-Hyun Kim, Xianzhi Du, Zhe Gan, Vivek Rathod, Bhuwan Dhingra
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 Computer Vision
Sep 4

Invoice Haystack: Benchmarking Document Retrieval and Visual Question Answering Under Strong Visual Homogeneity

The paper introduces Invoice Haystack, a benchmark of 1,500 anonymized invoices and 200 question‑answer pairs that tests document retrieval and visual question answering under strong visual homogeneity. It shows that existing benchmarks suffer from embedding collapse, with Invoice Haystack’s mean pairwise cosine similarity at 0.73 versus 0.38 and 0.31 in DocHaystack and InfoHaystack. The authors propose VL‑RAG, a hybrid retrieval‑augmented generation framework that combines text and visual embeddings and a VLM‑based verification filter, achieving 60.0% Recall@1 on Invoice Haystack‑500 and improving performance on other benchmarks.

By Heethanjan Kanagalingam, Thenukan Pathmanathan, Mokeeshan Vathanakumar, Basim Azam, Sarah Monazam Erfani, Naveed Akhtar
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Less Is More: Graph-free Multimodal RAG via Multi-signal Late Fusion

The paper introduces TrioRAG, a graph-free multimodal retrieval-augmented generation framework that combines evidence from the question, an anchor image, and a VLM-enhanced query via late fusion. It also presents AutoQA, a benchmark featuring noisy web-sourced images that require reasoning across manuals. TrioRAG outperforms graph-based systems on three benchmarks while cutting costs and speeding up inference by 1.6–2.3×.

By Tithi Rakshit, Hongkuan Zhou, Lavdim Halilaj, Yuqicheng Zhu