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.
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.
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:2604.22678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A common approach to question answering with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is to concatenate documents into a single context and pass it to...
arXiv:2608.21450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) relies on retrieving external information to answer queries involving long-tail entities. However, e...
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.
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...
arXiv:2608. 02907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrievers are essential for knowledge-based visual question answering, where they retrieve external evidence for image-question pairs.
arXiv:2609.08188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) augmented with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) benefit from access to external evidence. However, standard retriever...
arXiv:2609.13158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly expected to perform visual question answering (VQA) over planar media. However, existing planar...
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...
arXiv:2609.22162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves the factuality of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by grounding generatio...
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...