An Empirical Study of VLM Pipelines for Long-Document QA

The paper evaluates how different design choices—document feeding strategy, retrieval method, and execution mode—affect Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) on long‑document question answering. Experiments on two benchmarks show that a multi‑tool agent only outperforms static input when the VLM is large, that retrieval modality (image vs text) is more critical than the specific retriever, and that combining the best pipelines per question can significantly boost performance. The study highlights the trade‑offs between token efficiency, model size, and pipeline complexity for deploying VLMs on complex documents.

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• llms
• agents
• multimodal
• benchmarks