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:2606. 26458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over knowledge graphs has emerged as a promising approach for grounding large language models, yet existing benchmarks largely overlook the challenges of retrieval in multimodal knowledge graph RAG (MKG-RAG).
By Xiaochen Wang, Bao Hoang, Han Liu, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma
arXiv:2503. 10677v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has gained significant attention in recent years for its potential to enhance natural language understanding and generation by combining large-scale retrieval systems with generative models.
By Mingyue Cheng, Yucong Luo, Jie Ouyang, Qi Liu, Huijie Liu, Li Li, Shuo Yu, Bohou Zhang, Jiawei Cao, Jie Ma, Daoyu Wang, Enhong Chen
arXiv:2606. 16092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements.
By Young Rok Jang, Hyesoo Kong, Kyunghwan An, Jae Sub Huh, Gyeonghun Kim, Stanley Jungkyu Choi
arXiv:2505.17613v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Automatically evaluating multimodal generation presents a significant challenge, as automated metrics often struggle to align with human evaluation...
By Jihan Yao, Yushi Hu, Wenyuan Wang, Bin Han, Shangbin Feng, Guang Yang, Yujie Yi, Bingbing Wen, Ranjay Krishna, Lucy Lu Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Noah A. Smith, Banghua Zhu
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:2608.30163v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-world knowledge resides in multimodal documents, necessitating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate question answering. However, ex...
By Ruofan Hu, Shengyang Xu, Minjie Hong, Xiaoda Yang, Sashuai Zhou, Ke Lei, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
The paper introduces a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework for scientific image quality assessment, targeting both the understanding (SIQA-U) and scoring (SIQA-S) tracks of the SIQA challenge. It builds a multimodal index that merges textual semantics with fine‑grained visual features and employs a multi‑route retrieval and fusion mechanism to supply large language models with relevant reference cases, improving their evaluation of complex scientific images. The approach aligns well with human expert judgment and secured first place in the SIQA-U track at the ICME 2026 Grand Challenges.
By Yinuo Zhang, Bingshuo Liu, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Qingbin Liu, Xi Chen, Jiang Bian, Xiaoyan Yu, Dianbo Sui
Multimodal Language Models as Text-to-Image Model Evaluators presents MT2IE, a framework where a multimodal large language model generates evaluation prompts and scores images, achieving higher correlation with human judgment than prior metrics. MT2IE recovers official T2I model rankings using only 20 prompts—far fewer than traditional benchmarks—and adapts prompts to each model’s performance, maintaining informative scoring ranges. The approach demonstrates that dynamic, interactive evaluation can replace static benchmarks as T2I models improve.
By Jiahui Chen, Candace Ross, Reyhane Askari-Hemmat, Koustuv Sinha, Melissa Hall, Amy Zhang, Michal Drozdzal, Adriana Romero-Soriano
This paper proposes a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework for scientific image quality assessment, designed to simultaneously address both the understanding track (SIQA-U) and the scoring t...
arXiv:2605. 29861v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced autonomous agents from deep search, which retrieves concise factual answers, to deep research, which synthesizes scattered evidence into long-form reports.
By Chenghao Zhang, Guanting Dong, Yufan Liu, Tong Zhao, Xiaoxi Li, Zhicheng Dou
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