arXiv:2609.21018v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent visual document retrieval (VDR) systems such as ColPali use multi-vector page embeddings, in which patch-level vectors enable fine-grained evide...
By Xu Yuan, Hua Liu, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li
Visual document retrieval has recently become increasingly important in applications such as enterprise search, scientific literature discovery, and retrieval-augmented generation. These applications depend on efficiently identifying query-relevant pages across large collections of visually rich documents.
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
Multi-vector vision-language retrievers enable fine-grained Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) through late interaction, but storing and scoring hundreds of visual patch embeddings per page incurs substantial overhead. Existing training-free methods rely on pruning or merging: pruning degrades sharply under aggressive compression, whereas merging does not explicitly prioritize important regions when forming representatives.
arXiv:2607. 07033v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models incur substantial inference costs because high-resolution inputs introduce thousands of visual tokens, many of which are redundant for a given query.
By Kyuan Oh, Bumsoo Kim
arXiv:2609.16841v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Increasing image resolution produces ever-longer visual-token sequences in vision-language models (VLMs), substantially raising their inference cost....
By Zhenbin Wang, Lei Zhang, Lituan Wang, Wei Huang, Yan Wang, Zhenwei Zhang
arXiv:2608.29951v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-modal late-interaction retrievers achieve strong retrieval on visually rich documents by representing each page as per patch embeddings and match...
By Trishan Singha Roy, Arkadeep Acharya, Vishwajeet Kumar, Jaydeep Sen, Sachindra Joshi
VisDocAgentBench is a closed‑corpus benchmark that evaluates static versus agentic retrieval for visually rich documents, using 2,375 pages from 100 documents and 120 queries that span direct, one‑bridge, and two‑bridge evidence structures. The benchmark includes semantic, relational, and visual queries, full‑document review, and hard‑negative validation. Results show that a strong visual retriever performs well on direct items but poorly on two‑bridge items, while agents improve performance, especially when using visual retrieval and iterative search capabilities.
By Lexiang Hu, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Dingkun Long, Yikang Li, Fuwei Zhang, Yisen Wang, Zhouchen Lin
arXiv:2609.37225v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for universal multimodal representation learning. However, existing methods eith...
By Zijing Cai, Yuzhe Wang, Jingxian Zhu, Fengbin Zhu, Richang Hong
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:2601.20107v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent Vision-Language Models (e.g., ColPali) enable fine-grained Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) but incur prohibitive multi-vector index st...
By Zhuchenyang Liu, Ziyu Hu, Yao Zhang, Yu Xiao
Multi-vector dense retrieval models, such as ColBERT, achieve strong retrieval effectiveness by modelling fine-grained token-level interactions between queries and documents. Methods such as PLAID use centroid-based quantisation of each token's vector to reduce the index size and speed up retrieval while maintaining strong effectiveness.