arXiv AI

Lost at the End: Primacy Bias in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering

arXiv:2606. 16494v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) lets vision-language systems answer questions that exceed their parametric knowledge by conditioning a reader on passages retrieved from a Wikipedia-scale knowledge base.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 1

Can Retrieval Heads See Images? Multimodal Retrieval Heads in Long-Context Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2605.27243v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large vision-language models increasingly rely on long-context modeling to reason over documents, hour-level videos, and long-horizon agent traject...

By Aaron Branson Cigres Li, Zhaowei Wang, Yu Zhao, Yiming Du, Haobo Li, Xiyu Ren, Ginny Wong, Simon See, Lishu Luo, Haodong Duan, Pasquale Minervini, Yangqiu Song
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Salient Knowledge Pathways: Sparse Cross-Modal Routing for Efficient Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Question Answering

arXiv:2607. 25422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge-intensive multimodal question answering (KI-MMQA) sits at the intersection of three expensive primitives: long visual token sequences, dense retrieval over large external corpora, and full cross-modal fusion.

By Noor Islam S. Mohammad, Ulu\u{g} Bayaz{\i}t
arXiv AI
Aug 18

mR$^2$AG: Multimodal Retrieval-Reflection-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Based VQA

arXiv:2411. 15041v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with recent Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, such as INFOSEEK and Encyclopedic-VQA, due to their limited and frozen knowledge scope, often leading to ambiguous and inaccurate responses.

By Tao Zhang, Ziqi Zhang, Zongyang Ma, Yuxin Chen, Zhongang Qi, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Junfu Pu, Yuxuan Zhao, Zehua Xie, Jin Ma, Ying Shan, Weiming Hu
arXiv AI
Jun 16

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

arXiv:2602. 00344v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens.

By Beidi Zhao, Wenlong Deng, Xinting Liao, Yushu Li, Nazim Shaikh, Yao Nie, Xiaoxiao Li
arXiv AI
Jul 17

Stop Thinking, Start Looking: Efficient Post-Training for Multimodal Document Question Answering via Reasoning-Free Alignment

arXiv:2607. 14682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient multimodal document question answering with explicit visual grounding, locating the precise document region that supports each answer remains an open challenge.

By Harikrishnan P M, Goutham Vignesh, Ganesh Parab, Saisubramaniam Gopalakrishnan, Vishal Vaddina, Varun V, Rohit Agrawal
arXiv AI
Sep 2

MIDR: Enrichment-Augmented Indexing for Multimodal Document Retrieval

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