V‑Retrver is an evidence‑driven retrieval framework that treats universal multimodal retrieval as an agentic reasoning process grounded in visual inspection. It allows multimodal large language models to selectively acquire visual evidence through external tools, alternating between hypothesis generation and targeted visual verification. The approach is trained with a curriculum that blends supervised activation, rejection‑based refinement, and reinforcement learning, achieving an average 23.0% improvement in retrieval accuracy across multiple benchmarks.
By Dongyang Chen, Chaoyang Wang, Dezhao Su, Xi Xiao, Zeyu Zhang, Jing Xiong, Qing Li, Yuzhang Shang, Shichao Kan
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: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:2607. 24748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visually-rich documents such as reports, slides, and manuals often distribute the evidence needed to answer a question across multiple pages, mixing text with layout cues, tables, charts, and figures.
By Seonok Kim
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
CLIMB is a training‑free inference‑time framework for multimodal retrieval‑augmented generation. It builds a compact complementary evidence pool using an MMR‑style objective that balances relevance and redundancy, then refines answers with a confidence‑controlled critic that scores relevance, specificity, and cross‑modal alignment. The method stops refinement when confidence no longer rises, improving performance on Encyclopedic‑VQA and InfoSeek without altering the retriever or language model.
By Hang Gao, Wujiang Xu, Zhixing Zhang, Kai Mei, Jingyi Yang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
arXiv:2606. 01613v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents an agentic multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for domain-specific literature reasoning, instantiated on a curated corpus of several thousand papers in intelligent tires, vehicle dynamics, vehicle control, sensing, estimation, and machine learning.
By Kanwar Bharat Singh
arXiv:2609.08025v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reasoning agents increasingly rely on external tools such as web search to answer complex queries. Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning algorithms su...
By Vishwas Sathish, Viresh Ranjan, Xinliang Zhu, Arnab Dhua, Douglas Gray
Iterative retrieval-reasoning agents have recently shown promise for multimodal long-document question answering. However, most existing systems maintain a single growing context that mixes retrieval traces, observations, and intermediate reasoning.
arXiv:2604. 09508v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VRAG) empowers Vision-Language Models to retrieve and reason over visually rich documents.
By Yucheng Shen, Jiulong Wu, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Lingyong Yan, Min Cao
arXiv:2606. 05749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative retrieval-reasoning agents have recently shown promise for multimodal long-document question answering.
By Kaifeng Chen, Hongtao Liu, Qiyao Peng, Jian Yang, Yongqiang Liu, Xiaochen Zhang, Qing Yang
arXiv:2604.07146v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires vision-language models to understand images and use external knowledge, especially for...
By Zhuohong Chen, Zhenxian Wu, Yunyao Yu, Hangrui Xu, Zirui Liao, Zhifang Liu, Xiangwen Deng, Pen Jiao, Haoqian Wang