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.
arXiv:2609.07262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Late-interaction visual document retrievers preserve fine-grained page evidence by storing many token embeddings per page, but the resulting storage...
ViSAR is a training‑free, adaptive‑k retrieval method for Visual Document Question Answering that operates directly in the embedding space to build a query‑conditioned page‑level similarity matrix. By dynamically selecting the number of pages to retrieve based on query relevance, ViSAR reduces Retrieval‑Augmented Generation latency by up to 58.7% while maintaining or improving answer accuracy across multiple encoders and Large Vision‑Language Models. The structure of the similarity matrix also correlates with answer accuracy, indicating potential for retrieval quality‑aware document understanding.
arXiv:2608.15698v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual document retrieval is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, aiming to identify query-relevant pages from docume...
Visual document retrieval is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, aiming to identify query-relevant pages from document collections where evidence is distributed across t...
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 02814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural retrievers are trained to estimate query-document relevance from annotated query-document pairs.
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.
The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.
ICICLE is an in‑context indexing framework that expands generative retrieval by supplying newly added documents as inference‑time evidence. It generates document identifiers using both parametric memory and context‑provided document‑docid pairs, employing a [COPY] routing mechanism, preference‑based calibration, and large‑context adaptation to separate context‑grounded retrieval from parametric retrieval. Experiments on MS MARCO and NQ320K demonstrate that ICICLE improves retrieval of new documents while retaining performance on previously indexed documents without retraining the model.
arXiv:2607. 20556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In large-scale text analysis tasks, pre-trained language models are often used to embed text corpora for downstream analysis.