arXiv AI July 8, 2026 By Xue Li, Yiming Gai

Modality Relevance is not Modality Utility: Post-hoc Selective Modality Escalation for Cost-Aware Multimodal RAG

arXiv:2607. 05438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds a generator in evidence drawn from heterogeneous modalities -- text, tables, and images.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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

nlp efficiency multimodal benchmarks

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

llms rag nlp fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 8

MCERF: Advancing Multimodal LLM Evaluation of Engineering Documentation with Enhanced Retrieval

arXiv:2604. 09552v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Engineering rulebooks and technical standards contain multimodal information like dense text, tables, and illustrations that are challenging for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems.

By Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, Hoang Anh Nguyen, Anna C. Doris, Amir Mohammad Vahedi, Daniele Grandi, Faez Ahmed, Hongyi Xu

llms rag agents nlp multimodal benchmarks

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 14

Retrieved Images as Visual Thought: Training-Free Multimodal In-Context Learning for the Open-vs-Closed Gap

ReVisIT is a train‑free framework that turns retrieved image‑label pairs into units of visual thought, combining structured class definitions, multimodal retrieval, and alternating user/assistant injection before joint decoding. On several benchmarks—including Fast Open MiniImageNet, Bongard‑OpenWorld, and the newly released MAAC‑Bench—ReVisIT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing large, trained models while using far fewer parameters. The approach demonstrates that high‑quality retrieval and a simple turns layer can provide a universal performance boost across diverse multimodal tasks.

By Bingchen Huang, Zhiling Wang, Yifu Chen, Yuanchao Du

llms multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 28

Reason Before You Retrieve: Agentic Planning for Multi-modal RAG

arXiv:2607. 22643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (mRAG) aims to answer image-text queries with external knowledge, but most existing systems still retrieve directly from raw multimodal input over a flat evidence space.

By Tianyu Yang, Shir Simon, Zhenzhen Li, Minhao Cheng, Xiangliang Zhang

rag agents fine-tuning multimodal

arXiv AI

Sep 10

CrossModalQA: A Cross-modal and Multi-hop Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-augmented Generation

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

llms rag multimodal benchmarks

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Related stories

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

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

MCERF: Advancing Multimodal LLM Evaluation of Engineering Documentation with Enhanced Retrieval

Retrieved Images as Visual Thought: Training-Free Multimodal In-Context Learning for the Open-vs-Closed Gap

Reason Before You Retrieve: Agentic Planning for Multi-modal RAG

CrossModalQA: A Cross-modal and Multi-hop Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-augmented Generation