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.

Summary generated by The Flow from the publisher's feed. 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

1d ago

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 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

Jun 16

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.

By Jieyuan Liu, Jianyang Gu, Shijie Chen, Jefferson Chen, Zhen Wang

llms rag nlp multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jun 2

RASER: Recoverability-Aware Selective Escalation Router for Multi-Hop Question Answering

arXiv:2606. 02488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-hop question-answering systems often use expensive retrieval on every question.

By Yuyang Li, Zihe Yan, Tobias K\"afer

llms rag nlp benchmarks

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

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

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

RASER: Recoverability-Aware Selective Escalation Router for Multi-Hop Question Answering