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:2607. 25422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge-intensive multimodal question answering (KI-MMQA) sits at the intersection of three expensive primitives: long visual token sequences, dense retrieval over large external corpora, and full cross-modal fusion.
By Noor Islam S. Mohammad, Ulu\u{g} Bayaz{\i}t
arXiv:2509. 07295v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) unify visual understanding and generation within a single architecture.
By Ji Xie, Trevor Darrell, Luke Zettlemoyer, XuDong Wang
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
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
arXiv:2604. 01280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to identify and combine fine-grained visual cues with retrieved textual evidence.
By Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
arXiv:2607. 24799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models tend to hallucinate when answering domain-specific ques tions from scientific documents without prior fine-tuning.
By Alexandru-Andrei Sauc\u{a}, Ana-Luiza Rusnac
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:2607. 14682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient multimodal document question answering with explicit visual grounding, locating the precise document region that supports each answer remains an open challenge.
By Harikrishnan P M, Goutham Vignesh, Ganesh Parab, Saisubramaniam Gopalakrishnan, Vishal Vaddina, Varun V, Rohit Agrawal
arXiv:2607. 05438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds a generator in evidence drawn from heterogeneous modalities -- text, tables, and images.
By Xue Li, Yiming Gai
arXiv:2602. 00415v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory is not merely a storage mechanism for intelligent systems, but a structure for organizing evidence and constraining belief.
By Zhisheng Chen, Tingyu Wu, Zijie Zhou, Zhengwei Xie, Jinhan Li, Ziyan Weng, Liang Lin, Jingwei Song, Zikai Xiao, Yingwei Zhang
arXiv:2607. 09623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present our submission to the QANTA 2026 shared challenge at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Efficient Multimodal Question Answering (EMM-QA).
By Nirjhar Das, Md. Al-Mamun Provath