arXiv Computation and Language

ManGo: Manga Active Narrative Grounding Optimization

ManGo is an unsupervised framework for manga visual question answering that actively selects panels, extracts concise clues, and decides when to stop, creating a compact evidence sketch before answering. It introduces Active Narrative Sketching (ANS) and optimizes its behavior using group-relative policy training with two rewards: answer preference from listwise self-ranking and path consistency from stable ordered panel trajectories. Experiments on standard manga understanding benchmarks demonstrate that ManGo achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance across different settings.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

Navigating Sparse Evidence: Agentic Visual RAG via Explicit Context Selection and Consolidation

The paper introduces SCoRE, an agentic framework for Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation that explicitly selects and consolidates visual evidence before generating answers. It addresses two key challenges: sparse, scattered evidence and noisy exploration trajectories that obscure reasoning. By maintaining a textual ledger of relevant observations and reloading original images for a logical evidence sequence, SCoRE decouples reasoning from exploration and enforces strict visual grounding, with training that rewards evidence coverage, compactness, and answer correctness.

By Yucheng Shen, Lingyong Yan, Jiulong Wu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jianmin WU, Dawei Yin, Min Cao
arXiv AI
Jul 22

PlotTwist: A Creative Plot Generation Framework with Small Language Models

arXiv:2603. 16410v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Creative plot generation presents a fundamental challenge for language models: transforming a concise premise into a coherent narrative that sustains global coherence, character development, pacing, tone consistency, and emotional progression.

By Abhinav Thorat, Ravi Kolla, Jyotin Goel, Madhav Kataria, Niranjan Pedanekar
arXiv AI
Sep 3

DocHop: Benchmarking Out-of-domain Multi-hop Reasoning in Information-Dense Documents

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 AI
Sep 15

NoteVQA: Benchmarking VLMs on Real-Life Questions from Human Communities

NoteVQA is a new benchmark that collects 252 real‑life visual questions from the Chinese image‑sharing platform Xiaohongshu, covering 12 topics and 7 user intents. Each question is paired with a concise expert reference and a human‑audited interleaved answer that blends text and visual evidence. The study evaluates VLMs on short‑answer correctness and interleaved answer quality using a new AgenticInterleave framework and a 12‑dimensional IVR‑12 rubric, finding that even state‑of‑the‑art models achieve only about 53% accuracy and lag behind human references in content quality.

By Haonan Jiang, Guojian Zhan, Jiancong Xie, Shijun Wan, Dongiia Zhao, Cheng Chen, Yahui Liu, Yao Hu, Chuan Mu
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Narrative Knowledge Weaver: Narrative-Centric Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Long-Form Text Understanding

arXiv:2606. 05724v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form narrative QA requires reasoning over evolving story worlds rather than isolated passages: answers may depend on earlier goals, changing character states, social relations, causal triggers, temporal position, and later consequences.

By Qiuyu Tian, Fengyi Chen, Yiding Li, Youyong Kong, Fan Guo, Yuyao Li, Jinjing Shen, Zhijing Xie, Yiyun Luo, Xin Zhang, Yingce Xia, Zequn Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Incentivizing Vision Language Models to Search for Long Video Question Answering

arXiv:2607. 02959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce VSeek, an agentic framework that transforms long-video question answering (LVQA) from a passive, single-pass perception task into a multi-turn retrieval process.

By Harsh Goel, S P Sharan, Sahil Shah, Minkyu Choi, Joungbin An, Kristen Grauman, Sandeep P. Chinchali