WeAgent-MMSearch introduces a multimodal search agent that preserves retrieved images as persistent references, enabling the model to inspect, process, and cite them throughout a search trajectory. The system includes a harness (WeAgent-Harness), a post‑training method (FA‑GSPO) that recovers salvageable rollouts, and a new benchmark (VisTarget‑Bench) to evaluate image‑retrieval versus visual‑perception failures. Evaluation shows that agentic post‑training boosts performance by 19.22 points, allowing the model to outperform similarly sized open‑source models and compete with much larger ones.
By Zongkai Liu, Hui Zhang, Liqiang Niu, Zhen Cao, Han Li, Juntao Liu, Wenchao Chen, Chengduo Zhao, Chao Yu, Fandong Meng
arXiv:2609.05518v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Despite the strong capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their parametric knowledge remains incomplete and difficult to update, m...
By Jiacheng Cai, Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Huachi Zhou, Qinggang Zhang, Xiao Huang
arXiv:2601.19060v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MM-RAG) augments visual question answering (VQA) with external knowledge, but many systems rely on...
By Jeonghwan Kim, Renjie Tao, Sanat Sharma, Jiaqi Wang, Kai Sun, Zhaojiang Lin, Seungwhan Moon, Lambert Mathias, Anuj Kumar, Heng Ji, Xin Luna Dong
Due to their strong generalizable multimodal processing and reasoning capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential as universal image retrievers, effectively addressing diverse real-world image retrieval tasks. Nevertheless, pioneering studies, while promising, overlook the potential of fine-grained context modeling and disentangled fine-tuning objectives in enhancing MLLMs' retrieval performance, particularly for complex tasks such as long-text-to-image retrieval, visual dialog retrieval, and composed image retrieval (CIR).
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
arXiv:2608.23102v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging paradigm in content-based image retrieval that enables users to formulate compositional queries by combin...
By Fan Xu, Luis A. Leiva
arXiv:2602.09839v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks largely emphasize semantic matching on daily-life images and offer limited diagnostics of professional kno...
By Yijie Lin, Guofeng Ding, Haochen Zhou, Haobin Li, Mouxing Yang, Xi Peng
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
The paper introduces the AutoRegressive Retriever (ARR), a multimodal retrieval model that iteratively refines a query embedding by selecting informative items and incorporating their content. ARR alternates between retrieval and query update, using stepwise contrastive supervision and reinforcement learning to optimize item selection and final ranking. Experiments show ARR outperforms baselines on in‑domain and zero‑shot benchmarks, with feedback improving both inference performance and initial query embeddings.
By Jianfei Zhao, Yifan Wang, Feng Zhang, Xin Sun, Chong Feng, Zhixing Tan, Yang Luo, Boyuan Pan, Xu Kai, Yao Hu
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
Current instruction-based image retrieval systems are powerful but limited to single-turn interactions, failing to capture the iterative nature of complex, real-world visual searches. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contextual Composed Image Retrieval (CoCo-IR), a novel task that enables users to progressively refine search results through interactions.
arXiv:2608. 12987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative information retrieval (GIR) has emerged as a compelling alternative to the conventional index-retrieve-then-rank retrieval pipeline by training a generator to produce the identifiers of relevant items directly.
By Kaipeng Li, Haitao Yu, Xuanchen Zhou