arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

V-Retrver: Evidence-Driven Agentic Reasoning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

V‑Retrver is an evidence‑driven retrieval framework that treats universal multimodal retrieval as an agentic reasoning process grounded in visual inspection. It allows multimodal large language models to selectively acquire visual evidence through external tools, alternating between hypothesis generation and targeted visual verification. The approach is trained with a curriculum that blends supervised activation, rejection‑based refinement, and reinforcement learning, achieving an average 23.0% improvement in retrieval accuracy across multiple benchmarks.

By Dongyang Chen, Chaoyang Wang, Dezhao Su, Xi Xiao, Zeyu Zhang, Jing Xiong, Qing Li, Yuzhang Shang, Shichao Kan
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Navigating Sparse Evidence: Agentic Visual RAG via Explicit Context Selection and Consolidation

The paper introduces SCoRE, an agentic framework for Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation that explicitly selects and consolidates visual evidence before generating answers. It addresses two key challenges: sparse, scattered evidence and noisy exploration trajectories that obscure reasoning. By maintaining a textual ledger of relevant observations and reloading original images for a logical evidence sequence, SCoRE decouples reasoning from exploration and enforces strict visual grounding, with training that rewards evidence coverage, compactness, and answer correctness.

By Yucheng Shen, Lingyong Yan, Jiulong Wu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jianmin WU, Dawei Yin, Min Cao
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

CLIMB: Confidence-Guided Complementary Evidence for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

CLIMB is a training‑free inference‑time framework for multimodal retrieval‑augmented generation. It builds a compact complementary evidence pool using an MMR‑style objective that balances relevance and redundancy, then refines answers with a confidence‑controlled critic that scores relevance, specificity, and cross‑modal alignment. The method stops refinement when confidence no longer rises, improving performance on Encyclopedic‑VQA and InfoSeek without altering the retriever or language model.

By Hang Gao, Wujiang Xu, Zhixing Zhang, Kai Mei, Jingyi Yang, Dimitris N. Metaxas