Daily Papers

Multimodal document retrieval systems have shown strong progress in aligning visual and textual content for semantic search. However, most existing approaches remain heavily English-centric, limiting their effectiveness in multilingual contexts. In this work, we present M3DR (Multilingual Multimodal Document Retrieval), a framework designed to bridge this gap across languages, enabling applicability across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. M3DR leverages synthetic multilingual document data and generalizes across different vision-language architectures and model sizes, enabling robust cross-lingual and cross-modal alignment. Using contrastive training, our models learn unified representations for text and document images that transfer effectively across languages. We validate this capability on 22 typologically diverse languages, demonstrating consistent performance and adaptability across linguistic and script variations. We further introduce a comprehensive benchmark that captures real-world multilingual scenarios, evaluating models under monolingual, multilingual, and mixed-language settings. M3DR generalizes across both single dense vector and ColBERT-style token-level multi-vector retrieval paradigms. Our models, NetraEmbed and ColNetraEmbed achieve state-of-the-art performance with ~150% relative improvements on cross-lingual retrieval.

Multimodal document retrieval systems enable information access across text, images, and layouts, benefiting various domains like document-based question answering, report analysis, and interactive content summarization. Rerankers improve retrieval precision by reordering retrieved candidates. However, current multimodal reranking methods remain underexplored, with significant room for improvement in both training strategies and overall effectiveness. Moreover, the lack of explicit reasoning makes it difficult to analyze and optimize these methods further. In this paper, We propose MM-R5, a MultiModal Reasoning-Enhanced ReRanker via Reinforcement Learning for Document Retrieval, aiming to provide a more effective and reliable solution for multimodal reranking tasks. MM-R5 is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the SFT stage, we focus on improving instruction-following and guiding the model to generate complete and high-quality reasoning chains. To support this, we introduce a novel data construction strategy that produces rich, high-quality reasoning data. In the RL stage, we design a task-specific reward framework, including a reranking reward tailored for multimodal candidates and a composite template-based reward to further refine reasoning quality. We conduct extensive experiments on MMDocIR, a challenging public benchmark spanning multiple domains. MM-R5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on most metrics and delivers comparable results to much larger models on the remaining ones. Moreover, compared to the best retrieval-only method, MM-R5 improves recall@1 by over 4%. These results validate the effectiveness of our reasoning-enhanced training pipeline.

Rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded information retrieval beyond purely textual inputs, enabling retrieval from complex real world documents that combine text and visuals. However, most documents are private either owned by individuals or confined within corporate silos and current retrievers struggle when faced with unseen domains or languages. To address this gap, we introduce PREMIR, a simple yet effective framework that leverages the broad knowledge of an MLLM to generate cross modal pre questions (preQs) before retrieval. Unlike earlier multimodal retrievers that compare embeddings in a single vector space, PREMIR leverages preQs from multiple complementary modalities to expand the scope of matching to the token level. Experiments show that PREMIR achieves state of the art performance on out of distribution benchmarks, including closed domain and multilingual settings, outperforming strong baselines across all retrieval metrics. We confirm the contribution of each component through in depth ablation studies, and qualitative analyses of the generated preQs further highlight the model's robustness in real world settings.

Cross-modal retrieval is gaining increasing efficacy and interest from the research community, thanks to large-scale training, novel architectural and learning designs, and its application in LLMs and multimodal LLMs. In this paper, we move a step forward and design an approach that allows for multimodal queries, composed of both an image and a text, and can search within collections of multimodal documents, where images and text are interleaved. Our model, ReT, employs multi-level representations extracted from different layers of both visual and textual backbones, both at the query and document side. To allow for multi-level and cross-modal understanding and feature extraction, ReT employs a novel Transformer-based recurrent cell that integrates both textual and visual features at different layers, and leverages sigmoidal gates inspired by the classical design of LSTMs. Extensive experiments on M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks show that ReT achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse settings. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/aimagelab/ReT.

Retrieval-augmented generation has proven practical when models require specialized knowledge or access to the latest data. However, existing methods for multimodal document retrieval often replicate techniques developed for text-only retrieval, whether in how they encode documents, define training objectives, or compute similarity scores. To address these limitations, we present ColMate, a document retrieval model that bridges the gap between multimodal representation learning and document retrieval. ColMate utilizes a novel OCR-based pretraining objective, a self-supervised masked contrastive learning objective, and a late interaction scoring mechanism more relevant to multimodal document structures and visual characteristics. ColMate obtains 3.61% improvements over existing retrieval models on the ViDoRe V2 benchmark, demonstrating stronger generalization to out-of-domain benchmarks.

In the real world, documents are organized in different formats and varied modalities. Traditional retrieval pipelines require tailored document parsing techniques and content extraction modules to prepare input for indexing. This process is tedious, prone to errors, and has information loss. To this end, we propose Document Screenshot Embedding} (DSE), a novel retrieval paradigm that regards document screenshots as a unified input format, which does not require any content extraction preprocess and preserves all the information in a document (e.g., text, image and layout). DSE leverages a large vision-language model to directly encode document screenshots into dense representations for retrieval. To evaluate our method, we first craft the dataset of Wiki-SS, a 1.3M Wikipedia web page screenshots as the corpus to answer the questions from the Natural Questions dataset. In such a text-intensive document retrieval setting, DSE shows competitive effectiveness compared to other text retrieval methods relying on parsing. For example, DSE outperforms BM25 by 17 points in top-1 retrieval accuracy. Additionally, in a mixed-modality task of slide retrieval, DSE significantly outperforms OCR text retrieval methods by over 15 points in nDCG@10. These experiments show that DSE is an effective document retrieval paradigm for diverse types of documents. Model checkpoints, code, and Wiki-SS collection will be released.

The ability to understand and answer questions over documents can be useful in many business and practical applications. However, documents often contain lengthy and diverse multimodal contents such as texts, figures, and tables, which are very time-consuming for humans to read thoroughly. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop effective and automated methods to aid humans in this task. In this work, we introduce M-LongDoc, a benchmark of 851 samples, and an automated framework to evaluate the performance of large multimodal models. We further propose a retrieval-aware tuning approach for efficient and effective multimodal document reading. Compared to existing works, our benchmark consists of more recent and lengthy documents with hundreds of pages, while also requiring open-ended solutions and not just extractive answers. To our knowledge, our training framework is the first to directly address the retrieval setting for multimodal long documents. To enable tuning open-source models, we construct a training corpus in a fully automatic manner for the question-answering task over such documents. Experiments show that our tuning approach achieves a relative improvement of 4.6% for the correctness of model responses, compared to the baseline open-source models. Our data, code, and models are available at https://multimodal-documents.github.io.

Understanding information from a collection of multiple documents, particularly those with visually rich elements, is important for document-grounded question answering. This paper introduces VisDoMBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate QA systems in multi-document settings with rich multimodal content, including tables, charts, and presentation slides. We propose VisDoMRAG, a novel multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that simultaneously utilizes visual and textual RAG, combining robust visual retrieval capabilities with sophisticated linguistic reasoning. VisDoMRAG employs a multi-step reasoning process encompassing evidence curation and chain-of-thought reasoning for concurrent textual and visual RAG pipelines. A key novelty of VisDoMRAG is its consistency-constrained modality fusion mechanism, which aligns the reasoning processes across modalities at inference time to produce a coherent final answer. This leads to enhanced accuracy in scenarios where critical information is distributed across modalities and improved answer verifiability through implicit context attribution. Through extensive experiments involving open-source and proprietary large language models, we benchmark state-of-the-art document QA methods on VisDoMBench. Extensive results show that VisDoMRAG outperforms unimodal and long-context LLM baselines for end-to-end multimodal document QA by 12-20%.

Late-interaction multimodal retrieval models like ColPali achieve state-of-the-art document retrieval by embedding pages as images and computing fine-grained similarity between query tokens and visual patches. However, they return entire pages rather than specific regions, limiting utility for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) where precise context is paramount. Conversely, OCR-based systems extract structured text with bounding box coordinates but lack semantic grounding for relevance assessment. We propose a hybrid architecture that unifies these paradigms: using ColPali's patch-level similarity scores as spatial relevance filters over OCR-extracted regions. We formalize the coordinate mapping between vision transformer patch grids and OCR bounding boxes, introduce intersection metrics for relevance propagation, and establish theoretical bounds on area efficiency. We evaluate on BBox-DocVQA with ground-truth bounding boxes. For within-page localization (given correct page retrieval), ColQwen3-4B with percentile-50 thresholding achieves 59.7% hit rate at [email protected] (84.4% at [email protected], 35.8% at [email protected]), with mean IoU of 0.569, compared to ~6.7% for random region selection. Our approach reduces context tokens by 28.8% compared to returning all OCR regions and by 52.3% compared to full-page image tokens. Our approach operates at inference time without additional training. We release Snappy, an open-source implementation at https://github.com/athrael-soju/Snappy.

Multimodal encoders have pushed the boundaries of visual document retrieval, matching textual query tokens directly to image patches and achieving state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks. Recent models relying on this paradigm have massively scaled the sizes of their query and document representations, presenting obstacles to deployment and scalability in real-world pipelines. Furthermore, purely vision-centric approaches may be constrained by the inherent modality gap still exhibited by modern vision-language models. In this work, we connect these challenges to the paradigm of hybrid retrieval, investigating whether a lightweight dense text retriever can enhance a stronger vision-centric model. Existing hybrid methods, which rely on coarse-grained fusion of ranks or scores, fail to exploit the rich interactions within each model's representation space. To address this, we introduce Guided Query Refinement (GQR), a novel test-time optimization method that refines a primary retriever's query embedding using guidance from a complementary retriever's scores. Through extensive experiments on visual document retrieval benchmarks, we demonstrate that GQR allows vision-centric models to match the performance of models with significantly larger representations, while being up to 14x faster and requiring 54x less memory. Our findings show that GQR effectively pushes the Pareto frontier for performance and efficiency in multimodal retrieval. We release our code at https://github.com/IBM/test-time-hybrid-retrieval

Universal multimodal embedding models have achieved great success in capturing semantic relevance between queries and candidates. However, current methods either condense queries and candidates into a single vector, potentially limiting the expressiveness for fine-grained information, or produce too many vectors that are prohibitively expensive for multi-vector retrieval. In this work, we introduce MetaEmbed, a new framework for multimodal retrieval that rethinks how multimodal embeddings are constructed and interacted with at scale. During training, a fixed number of learnable Meta Tokens are appended to the input sequence. At test-time, their last-layer contextualized representations serve as compact yet expressive multi-vector embeddings. Through the proposed Matryoshka Multi-Vector Retrieval training, MetaEmbed learns to organize information by granularity across multiple vectors. As a result, we enable test-time scaling in multimodal retrieval, where users can balance retrieval quality against efficiency demands by selecting the number of tokens used for indexing and retrieval interactions. Extensive evaluations on the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark (MMEB) and the Visual Document Retrieval Benchmark (ViDoRe) confirm that MetaEmbed achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance while scaling robustly to models with 32B parameters.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great promise for complex document understanding, yet their development is critically hampered by inadequate evaluation. Current benchmarks often focus on specific part of document RAG system and use synthetic data with incomplete ground truth and evidence labels, therefore failing to reflect real-world bottlenecks and challenges. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Double-Bench: a new large-scale, multilingual, and multimodal evaluation system that is able to produce fine-grained assessment to each component within document RAG systems. It comprises 3,276 documents (72,880 pages) and 5,168 single- and multi-hop queries across 6 languages and 4 document types with streamlined dynamic update support for potential data contamination issues. Queries are grounded in exhaustively scanned evidence pages and verified by human experts to ensure maximum quality and completeness. Our comprehensive experiments across 9 state-of-the-art embedding models, 4 MLLMs and 4 end-to-end document RAG frameworks demonstrate the gap between text and visual embedding models is narrowing, highlighting the need in building stronger document retrieval models. Our findings also reveal the over-confidence dilemma within current document RAG frameworks that tend to provide answer even without evidence support. We hope our fully open-source Double-Bench provide a rigorous foundation for future research in advanced document RAG systems. We plan to retrieve timely corpus and release new benchmarks on an annual basis.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven interest in billion-scale retrieval models with strong generalization across retrieval tasks and languages. Additionally, progress in large vision-language models has created new opportunities for multimodal retrieval. In response, we have updated the Tevatron toolkit, introducing a unified pipeline that enables researchers to explore retriever models at different scales, across multiple languages, and with various modalities. This demo paper highlights the toolkit's key features, bridging academia and industry by supporting efficient training, inference, and evaluation of neural retrievers. We showcase a unified dense retriever achieving strong multilingual and multimodal effectiveness, and conduct a cross-modality zero-shot study to demonstrate its research potential. Alongside, we release OmniEmbed, to the best of our knowledge, the first embedding model that unifies text, image document, video, and audio retrieval, serving as a baseline for future research.

Existing benchmarks for visual document retrieval (VDR) largely overlook non-English languages and the structural complexity of official publications. To address this critical gap, we introduce SDS KoPub VDR, the first large-scale, publicly available benchmark for retrieving and understanding Korean public documents. The benchmark is built upon a corpus of 361 real-world documents (40,781 pages), including 256 files under the KOGL Type 1 license and 105 from official legal portals, capturing complex visual elements like tables, charts, and multi-column layouts. To establish a challenging and reliable evaluation set, we constructed 600 query-page-answer triples. These were initially generated using multimodal models (e.g., GPT-4o) and subsequently underwent a rigorous human verification and refinement process to ensure factual accuracy and contextual relevance. The queries span six major public domains and are systematically categorized by the reasoning modality required: text-based, visual-based (e.g., chart interpretation), and cross-modal. We evaluate SDS KoPub VDR on two complementary tasks that reflect distinct retrieval paradigms: (1) text-only retrieval, which measures a model's ability to locate relevant document pages based solely on textual signals, and (2) multimodal retrieval, which assesses retrieval performance when visual features (e.g., tables, charts, and layouts) are jointly leveraged alongside text. This dual-task evaluation reveals substantial performance gaps, particularly in multimodal scenarios requiring cross-modal reasoning, even for state-of-the-art models. As a foundational resource, SDS KoPub VDR not only enables rigorous and fine-grained evaluation across textual and multimodal retrieval tasks but also provides a clear roadmap for advancing multimodal AI in complex, real-world document intelligence.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a core paradigm in document question answering tasks. However, existing methods have limitations when dealing with multimodal documents: one category of methods relies on layout analysis and text extraction, which can only utilize explicit text information and struggle to capture images or unstructured content; the other category treats document segmentation as visual input and directly passes it to visual language models (VLMs) for processing, yet it ignores the semantic advantages of text, leading to suboptimal retrieval and generation results. To address these research gaps, we propose the Co-Modality-based RAG (CMRAG) framework, which can simultaneously leverage texts and images for more accurate retrieval and generation. Our framework includes two key components: (1) a Unified Encoding Model (UEM) that projects queries, parsed text, and images into a shared embedding space via triplet-based training, and (2) a Unified Co-Modality-informed Retrieval (UCMR) method that statistically normalizes similarity scores to effectively fuse cross-modal signals. To support research in this direction, we further construct and release a large-scale triplet dataset of (query, text, image) examples. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework consistently outperforms single-modality--based RAG in multiple visual document question-answering (VDQA) benchmarks. The findings of this paper show that integrating co-modality information into the RAG framework in a unified manner is an effective approach to improving the performance of complex VDQA systems.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have revolutionized information retrieval and question answering, but traditional text-based chunking methods struggle with complex document structures, multi-page tables, embedded figures, and contextual dependencies across page boundaries. We present a novel multimodal document chunking approach that leverages Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to process PDF documents in batches while maintaining semantic coherence and structural integrity. Our method processes documents in configurable page batches with cross-batch context preservation, enabling accurate handling of tables spanning multiple pages, embedded visual elements, and procedural content. We evaluate our approach on a curated dataset of PDF documents with manually crafted queries, demonstrating improvements in chunk quality and downstream RAG performance. Our vision-guided approach achieves better accuracy compared to traditional vanilla RAG systems, with qualitative analysis showing superior preservation of document structure and semantic coherence.

The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has extended CLIP-based frameworks to produce powerful, universal embeddings for retrieval tasks. However, existing methods primarily focus on natural images, offering limited support for other crucial visual modalities such as videos and visual documents. To bridge this gap, we introduce RzenEmbed, a unified framework to learn embeddings across a diverse set of modalities, including text, images, videos, and visual documents. We employ a novel two-stage training strategy to learn discriminative representations. The first stage focuses on foundational text and multimodal retrieval. In the second stage, we introduce an improved InfoNCE loss, incorporating two key enhancements. Firstly, a hardness-weighted mechanism guides the model to prioritize challenging samples by assigning them higher weights within each batch. Secondly, we implement an approach to mitigate the impact of false negatives and alleviate data noise. This strategy not only enhances the model's discriminative power but also improves its instruction-following capabilities. We further boost performance with learnable temperature parameter and model souping. RzenEmbed sets a new state-of-the-art on the MMEB benchmark. It not only achieves the best overall score but also outperforms all prior work on the challenging video and visual document retrieval tasks. Our models are available in https://huggingface.co/qihoo360/RzenEmbed.

With the rapid advancement of multimodal retrieval and its application in LLMs and multimodal LLMs, increasingly complex retrieval tasks have emerged. Existing methods predominantly rely on task-specific fine-tuning of vision-language models and are limited to single-modality queries or documents. In this paper, we propose ReT-2, a unified retrieval model that supports multimodal queries, composed of both images and text, and searches across multimodal document collections where text and images coexist. ReT-2 leverages multi-layer representations and a recurrent Transformer architecture with LSTM-inspired gating mechanisms to dynamically integrate information across layers and modalities, capturing fine-grained visual and textual details. We evaluate ReT-2 on the challenging M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks across different retrieval configurations. Results demonstrate that ReT-2 consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse settings, while offering faster inference and reduced memory usage compared to prior approaches. When integrated into retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, ReT-2 also improves downstream performance on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek datasets. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/ReT-2

Multimodal embedding models are gaining prevalence, notably for document retrieval as efficient alternatives to text-only pipelines. These models are typically built by finetuning large vision-language decoders (VLMs) with contrastive losses on text-image pairs. In this work, we show that, while cost-efficient, this repurposing approach often bottlenecks retrieval performance. Through controlled experiments, we establish a principled recipe for improving visual document retrieval models. We notably measure the impact of attention masking, image resolution, modality alignment data regimes, and late interaction centered contrastive objectives which emerge as central performance factors. Building on these insights, we release ModernVBERT, a compact 250M-parameter vision-language encoder that outperforms models up to 10 times larger when finetuned on document retrieval tasks. Models and code are made available at https://huggingface.co/ModernVBERT.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved impressive progress in vision-language understanding, yet they face limitations in real-world applications requiring complex reasoning over a large number of images. Existing benchmarks for multi-image question-answering are limited in scope, each question is paired with only up to 30 images, which does not fully capture the demands of large-scale retrieval tasks encountered in the real-world usages. To reduce these gaps, we introduce two document haystack benchmarks, dubbed DocHaystack and InfoHaystack, designed to evaluate LMM performance on large-scale visual document retrieval and understanding. Additionally, we propose V-RAG, a novel, vision-centric retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that leverages a suite of multimodal vision encoders, each optimized for specific strengths, and a dedicated question-document relevance module. V-RAG sets a new standard, with a 9% and 11% improvement in Recall@1 on the challenging DocHaystack-1000 and InfoHaystack-1000 benchmarks, respectively, compared to the previous best baseline models. Additionally, integrating V-RAG with LMMs enables them to efficiently operate across thousands of images, yielding significant improvements on our DocHaystack and InfoHaystack benchmarks. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Vision-CAIR/dochaystacks

Multimodal embedding models have been crucial in enabling various downstream tasks such as semantic similarity, information retrieval, and clustering over different modalities. However, existing multimodal embeddings like VLM2Vec, E5-V, GME are predominantly focused on natural images, with limited support for other visual forms such as videos and visual documents. This restricts their applicability in real-world scenarios, including AI agents, multi-modal search and recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). To close this gap, we propose VLM2Vec-V2, a unified framework for learning embeddings across diverse visual forms. First, we introduce MMEB-V2, a comprehensive benchmark that extends MMEB with five new task types: visual document retrieval, video retrieval, temporal grounding, video classification and video question answering - spanning text, image, video, and visual document inputs. Next, we train VLM2Vec-V2, a general-purpose embedding model that supports text, image, video, and visual document inputs. Extensive experiments show that VLM2Vec-V2 achieves strong performance not only on the newly introduced video and document retrieval tasks, but also improves over prior baselines on the original image benchmarks. Through extensive evaluation, our study offers insights into the generalizability of various multimodal embedding models and highlights effective strategies for unified embedding learning, laying the groundwork for more scalable and adaptable representation learning in both research and real-world settings.

After pre-training on extensive image-text pairs, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) demonstrates promising performance on a wide variety of benchmarks. However, a substantial volume of non-paired data, such as multimodal interleaved documents, remains underutilized for vision-language representation learning. To fully leverage these unpaired documents, we initially establish a Real-World Data Extraction pipeline to extract high-quality images and texts. Then we design a hierarchical retrieval method to efficiently associate each image with multiple semantically relevant realistic texts. To further enhance fine-grained visual information, we propose an image semantic augmented generation module for synthetic text production. Furthermore, we employ a semantic balance sampling strategy to improve dataset diversity, enabling better learning of long-tail concepts. Based on these innovations, we construct RealSyn, a dataset combining realistic and synthetic texts, available in three scales: 15M, 30M, and 100M. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealSyn effectively advances vision-language representation learning and exhibits strong scalability. Models pre-trained on RealSyn achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream tasks. To facilitate future research, the RealSyn dataset and pre-trained model weights are released at https://github.com/deepglint/RealSyn.

The proliferation of multimodal Large Language Models has significantly advanced the ability to analyze and understand complex data inputs from different modalities. However, the processing of long documents remains under-explored, largely due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Document Haystack, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of Vision Language Models (VLMs) on long, visually complex documents. Document Haystack features documents ranging from 5 to 200 pages and strategically inserts pure text or multimodal text+image "needles" at various depths within the documents to challenge VLMs' retrieval capabilities. Comprising 400 document variants and a total of 8,250 questions, it is supported by an objective, automated evaluation framework. We detail the construction and characteristics of the Document Haystack dataset, present results from prominent VLMs and discuss potential research avenues in this area.

Reward models are critical for aligning vision-language systems with human preferences, yet current approaches suffer from hallucination, weak visual grounding, and an inability to use tools for verification, limiting their reliability on complex multimodal reasoning tasks. We present ARM-Thinker, an A}gentic multimodal Reward Model that autonomously invokes external tools (e.g., image cropping, doc page retrieval) to ground judgments in verifiable evidence, replacing static, non-interactive reward scoring. This enables the model to verify fine-grained visual details, cross-reference multi-page evidence, and validate reasoning claims, which are capabilities absent in existing reward models. We train ARM-Thinker with multi-stage reinforcement learning, jointly optimizing tool-calling decisions and judgment accuracy. To evaluate agentic reward modeling, we introduce ARMBench-VL, comprising three benchmarks that assess fine-grained visual grounding (image-level tools), multi-page document understanding (retrieval tools), and instruction following (text-level verification). ARM-Thinker achieves +16.2% average improvement on reward modeling benchmarks, +9.6% on tool-use tasks, and outperforms baselines on multimodal math and logical reasoning benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that agentic capabilities significantly enhance both accuracy and interpretability of reward models.

Current general-purpose large language models (LLMs) commonly exhibit knowledge hallucination and insufficient domain-specific adaptability in domain-specific tasks, limiting their effectiveness in specialized question answering scenarios. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) effectively tackles these challenges by integrating external knowledge to enhance accuracy and relevance. However, traditional RAG still faces limitations in domain knowledge accuracy and context modeling.To enhance domain-specific question answering performance, this work focuses on a graph-based RAG framework, emphasizing the critical role of knowledge graph quality during the generation process. We propose DSRAG (Domain-Specific RAG), a multimodal knowledge graph-driven retrieval-augmented generation framework designed for domain-specific applications. Our approach leverages domain-specific documents as the primary knowledge source, integrating heterogeneous information such as text, images, and tables to construct a multimodal knowledge graph covering both conceptual and instance layers. Building on this foundation, we introduce semantic pruning and structured subgraph retrieval mechanisms, combining knowledge graph context and vector retrieval results to guide the language model towards producing more reliable responses. Evaluations using the Langfuse multidimensional scoring mechanism show that our method excels in domain-specific question answering, validating the efficacy of integrating multimodal knowledge graphs with retrieval-augmented generation.

Document understanding is critical for applications from financial analysis to scientific discovery. Current approaches, whether OCR-based pipelines feeding Large Language Models (LLMs) or native Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), face key limitations: the former loses structural detail, while the latter struggles with context modeling. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps ground models in external data, but documents' multimodal nature, i.e., combining text, tables, charts, and layout, demands a more advanced paradigm: Multimodal RAG. This approach enables holistic retrieval and reasoning across all modalities, unlocking comprehensive document intelligence. Recognizing its importance, this paper presents a systematic survey of Multimodal RAG for document understanding. We propose a taxonomy based on domain, retrieval modality, and granularity, and review advances involving graph structures and agentic frameworks. We also summarize key datasets, benchmarks, and applications, and highlight open challenges in efficiency, fine-grained representation, and robustness, providing a roadmap for future progress in document AI.

Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (MM-RAG) is a key approach for applying large language models (LLMs) and agents to real-world knowledge bases, yet current evaluations are fragmented, focusing on either text or images in isolation or on simplified multimodal setups that fail to capture document-centric multimodal use cases. In this paper, we introduce UniDoc-Bench, the first large-scale, realistic benchmark for MM-RAG built from 70k real-world PDF pages across eight domains. Our pipeline extracts and links evidence from text, tables, and figures, then generates 1,600 multimodal QA pairs spanning factual retrieval, comparison, summarization, and logical reasoning queries. To ensure reliability, 20% of QA pairs are validated by multiple annotators and expert adjudication. UniDoc-Bench supports apples-to-apples comparison across four paradigms: (1) text-only, (2) image-only, (3) multimodal text-image fusion, and (4) multimodal joint retrieval -- under a unified protocol with standardized candidate pools, prompts, and evaluation metrics. Our experiments show that multimodal text-image fusion RAG systems consistently outperform both unimodal and jointly multimodal embedding-based retrieval, indicating that neither text nor images alone are sufficient and that current multimodal embeddings remain inadequate. Beyond benchmarking, our analysis reveals when and how visual context complements textual evidence, uncovers systematic failure modes, and offers actionable guidance for developing more robust MM-RAG pipelines.

Despite significant progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their performance on complex, multi-page document comprehension remains inadequate, largely due to the lack of high-quality, document-level datasets. While current retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods offer partial solutions, they suffer from issues, such as fragmented retrieval contexts, multi-stage error accumulation, and extra time costs of retrieval. In this work, we present a high-quality document-level dataset, Doc-750K, designed to support in-depth understanding of multimodal documents. This dataset includes diverse document structures, extensive cross-page dependencies, and real question-answer pairs derived from the original documents. Building on the dataset, we develop a native multimodal model, Docopilot, which can accurately handle document-level dependencies without relying on RAG. Experiments demonstrate that Docopilot achieves superior coherence, accuracy, and efficiency in document understanding tasks and multi-turn interactions, setting a new baseline for document-level multimodal understanding. Data, code, and models are released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Docopilot

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have recently shown great progress in text-rich image understanding, yet they still struggle with complex, multi-page, visually-rich documents. Traditional methods using document parsers for retrieval-augmented generation suffer from performance and efficiency limitations, while directly presenting all pages to LMMs leads to inefficiencies, especially with lengthy documents. In this work, we present a novel framework named LoRA-Contextualizing Adaptation of Large multimodal models (LoCAL), which broadens the capabilities of any LMM to support long-document understanding. We demonstrate that LMMs can effectively serve as multimodal retrievers, fetching relevant pages to answer user questions based on these pages. LoCAL is implemented with two specific LMM adapters: one for evidence page retrieval and another for question answering. Empirical results show state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of LoCAL.

Large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal variants can now process visual inputs, including images of text. This raises an intriguing question: can we compress textual inputs by feeding them as images to reduce token usage while preserving performance? In this paper, we show that visual text representations are a practical and surprisingly effective form of input compression for decoder LLMs. We exploit the idea of rendering long text inputs as a single image and provide it directly to the model. This leads to dramatically reduced number of decoder tokens required, offering a new form of input compression. Through experiments on two distinct benchmarks RULER (long-context retrieval) and CNN/DailyMail (document summarization) we demonstrate that this text-as-image method yields substantial token savings (often nearly half) without degrading task performance.

In recent years, visual question answering (VQA) has attracted attention from the research community because of its highly potential applications (such as virtual assistance on intelligent cars, assistant devices for blind people, or information retrieval from document images using natural language as queries) and challenge. The VQA task requires methods that have the ability to fuse the information from questions and images to produce appropriate answers. Neural visual question answering models have achieved tremendous growth on large-scale datasets which are mostly for resource-rich languages such as English. However, available datasets narrow the VQA task as the answers selection task or answer classification task. We argue that this form of VQA is far from human ability and eliminates the challenge of the answering aspect in the VQA task by just selecting answers rather than generating them. In this paper, we introduce the OpenViVQA (Open-domain Vietnamese Visual Question Answering) dataset, the first large-scale dataset for VQA with open-ended answers in Vietnamese, consists of 11,000+ images associated with 37,000+ question-answer pairs (QAs). Moreover, we proposed FST, QuMLAG, and MLPAG which fuse information from images and answers, then use these fused features to construct answers as humans iteratively. Our proposed methods achieve results that are competitive with SOTA models such as SAAA, MCAN, LORA, and M4C. The dataset is available to encourage the research community to develop more generalized algorithms including transformers for low-resource languages such as Vietnamese.

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) enhances reasoning capabilities by integrating external knowledge. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts that are prevalent in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce a novel task, Chart-based MRAG, to address this limitation. To semi-automatically generate high-quality evaluation samples, we propose CHARt-based document question-answering GEneration (CHARGE), a framework that produces evaluation data through structured keypoint extraction, crossmodal verification, and keypoint-based generation. By combining CHARGE with expert validation, we construct Chart-MRAG Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for chart-based MRAG evaluation, featuring 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents. Our evaluation reveals three critical limitations in current approaches: (1) unified multimodal embedding retrieval methods struggles in chart-based scenarios, (2) even with ground-truth retrieval, state-of-the-art MLLMs achieve only 58.19% Correctness and 73.87% Coverage scores, and (3) MLLMs demonstrate consistent text-over-visual modality bias during Chart-based MRAG reasoning. The CHARGE and Chart-MRAG Bench are released at https://github.com/Nomothings/CHARGE.git.

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) faces dual challenges in processing lengthy multimodal documents (text, images, tables) and performing cross-modal reasoning. Current document retrieval-augmented generation (DocRAG) methods remain limited by their text-centric approaches, frequently missing critical visual information. The field also lacks robust benchmarks for assessing multimodal evidence selection and integration. We introduce MMDocRAG, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 4,055 expert-annotated QA pairs with multi-page, cross-modal evidence chains. Our framework introduces innovative metrics for evaluating multimodal quote selection and enables answers that interleave text with relevant visual elements. Through large-scale experiments with 60 VLM/LLM models and 14 retrieval systems, we identify persistent challenges in multimodal evidence retrieval, selection, and integration.Key findings reveal advanced proprietary LVMs show superior performance than open-sourced alternatives. Also, they show moderate advantages using multimodal inputs over text-only inputs, while open-source alternatives show significant performance degradation. Notably, fine-tuned LLMs achieve substantial improvements when using detailed image descriptions. MMDocRAG establishes a rigorous testing ground and provides actionable insights for developing more robust multimodal DocVQA systems. Our benchmark and code are available at https://mmdocrag.github.io/MMDocRAG/.

Document Question Answering (QA) presents a challenge in understanding visually-rich documents (VRD), particularly those dominated by lengthy textual content like research journal articles. Existing studies primarily focus on real-world documents with sparse text, while challenges persist in comprehending the hierarchical semantic relations among multiple pages to locate multimodal components. To address this gap, we propose PDF-MVQA, which is tailored for research journal articles, encompassing multiple pages and multimodal information retrieval. Unlike traditional machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks, our approach aims to retrieve entire paragraphs containing answers or visually rich document entities like tables and figures. Our contributions include the introduction of a comprehensive PDF Document VQA dataset, allowing the examination of semantically hierarchical layout structures in text-dominant documents. We also present new VRD-QA frameworks designed to grasp textual contents and relations among document layouts simultaneously, extending page-level understanding to the entire multi-page document. Through this work, we aim to enhance the capabilities of existing vision-and-language models in handling challenges posed by text-dominant documents in VRD-QA.

The rapid advancement of unsupervised representation learning and large-scale pre-trained vision-language models has significantly improved cross-modal retrieval tasks. However, existing multi-modal information retrieval (MMIR) studies lack a comprehensive exploration of document-level retrieval and suffer from the absence of cross-domain datasets at this granularity. To address this limitation, we introduce DocMMIR, a novel multi-modal document retrieval framework designed explicitly to unify diverse document formats and domains, including Wikipedia articles, scientific papers (arXiv), and presentation slides, within a comprehensive retrieval scenario. We construct a large-scale cross-domain multimodal benchmark, comprising 450K samples, which systematically integrates textual and visual information. Our comprehensive experimental analysis reveals substantial limitations in current state-of-the-art MLLMs (CLIP, BLIP2, SigLIP-2, ALIGN) when applied to our tasks, with only CLIP demonstrating reasonable zero-shot performance. Furthermore, we conduct a systematic investigation of training strategies, including cross-modal fusion methods and loss functions, and develop a tailored approach to train CLIP on our benchmark. This results in a +31% improvement in MRR@10 compared to the zero-shot baseline. All our data and code are released in https://github.com/J1mL1/DocMMIR.

We present Omni-Embed-Nemotron, a unified multimodal retrieval embedding model developed to handle the increasing complexity of real-world information needs. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly advanced language models by incorporating external knowledge, existing text-based retrievers rely on clean, structured input and struggle with the visually and semantically rich content found in real-world documents such as PDFs, slides, or videos. Recent work such as ColPali has shown that preserving document layout using image-based representations can improve retrieval quality. Building on this, and inspired by the capabilities of recent multimodal models such as Qwen2.5-Omni, we extend retrieval beyond text and images to also support audio and video modalities. Omni-Embed-Nemotron enables both cross-modal (e.g., text - video) and joint-modal (e.g., text - video+audio) retrieval using a single model. We describe the architecture, training setup, and evaluation results of Omni-Embed-Nemotron, and demonstrate its effectiveness in text, image, and video retrieval.

Business Document Information Extraction (BDIE) is the problem of transforming a blob of unstructured information (raw text, scanned documents, etc.) into a structured format that downstream systems can parse and use. It has two main tasks: Key-Information Extraction (KIE) and Line Items Recognition (LIR). In this paper, we argue that BDIE is best modeled as a Tool Use problem, where the tools are these downstream systems. We then present Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation (RASG), a novel general framework for BDIE that achieves state of the art (SOTA) results on both KIE and LIR tasks on BDIE benchmarks. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) We show, with ablation benchmarks, that Large Language Models (LLMs) with RASG are already competitive with or surpasses current SOTA Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) without RASG on BDIE benchmarks. (2) We propose a new metric class for Line Items Recognition, General Line Items Recognition Metric (GLIRM), that is more aligned with practical BDIE use cases compared to existing metrics, such as ANLS*, DocILE, and GriTS. (3) We provide a heuristic algorithm for backcalculating bounding boxes of predicted line items and tables without the need for vision encoders. Finally, we claim that, while LMMs might sometimes offer marginal performance benefits, LLMs + RASG is oftentimes superior given real-world applications and constraints of BDIE.

Information Retrieval (IR) methods aim to identify relevant documents in response to a given query, which have gained remarkable attention due to their successful application in various natural language tasks. However, existing approaches typically consider only the textual information within the documents, which overlooks the fact that documents can contain multiple modalities, including texts, images, and tables. Further, they often segment each long document into multiple discrete passages for embedding, preventing them from capturing the overall document context and interactions between paragraphs. We argue that these two limitations lead to suboptimal document representations for retrieval. In this work, to address them, we aim to produce more comprehensive and nuanced document representations by holistically embedding documents interleaved with different modalities. Specifically, we achieve this by leveraging the capability of recent vision-language models that enable the processing and integration of text, images, and tables into a unified format and representation. Moreover, to mitigate the information loss from segmenting documents into passages, instead of representing and retrieving passages individually, we further merge the representations of segmented passages into one single document representation, while we additionally introduce a reranking strategy to decouple and identify the relevant passage within the document if necessary. Then, through extensive experiments on diverse information retrieval scenarios considering both the textual and multimodal queries, we show that our approach substantially outperforms relevant baselines, thanks to the consideration of the multimodal information interleaved within the documents in a unified way.

Most organizational data in this world are stored as documents, and visual retrieval plays a crucial role in unlocking the collective intelligence from all these documents. However, existing benchmarks focus on English-only document retrieval or only consider multilingual question-answering on a single-page image. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisR-Bench, a multilingual benchmark designed for question-driven multimodal retrieval in long documents. Our benchmark comprises over 35K high-quality QA pairs across 1.2K documents, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multimodal retrieval. VisR-Bench spans sixteen languages with three question types (figures, text, and tables), offering diverse linguistic and question coverage. Unlike prior datasets, we include queries without explicit answers, preventing models from relying on superficial keyword matching. We evaluate various retrieval models, including text-based methods, multimodal encoders, and MLLMs, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Our results show that while MLLMs significantly outperform text-based and multimodal encoder models, they still struggle with structured tables and low-resource languages, highlighting key challenges in multilingual visual retrieval.

The growing prevalence of visually rich documents, such as webpages and scanned/digital-born documents (images, PDFs, etc.), has led to increased interest in automatic document understanding and information extraction across academia and industry. Although various document modalities, including image, text, layout, and structure, facilitate human information retrieval, the interconnected nature of these modalities presents challenges for neural networks. In this paper, we introduce WebLM, a multimodal pre-training network designed to address the limitations of solely modeling text and structure modalities of HTML in webpages. Instead of processing document images as unified natural images, WebLM integrates the hierarchical structure of document images to enhance the understanding of markup-language-based documents. Additionally, we propose several pre-training tasks to model the interaction among text, structure, and image modalities effectively. Empirical results demonstrate that the pre-trained WebLM significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art pre-trained models across several webpage understanding tasks. The pre-trained models and code are available at https://github.com/X-LANCE/weblm.

Document AI (DAI) has emerged as a vital application area, and is significantly transformed by the advent of large language models (LLMs). While earlier approaches relied on encoder-decoder architectures, decoder-only LLMs have revolutionized DAI, bringing remarkable advancements in understanding and generation. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of DAI's evolution, highlighting current research attempts and future prospects of LLMs in this field. We explore key advancements and challenges in multimodal, multilingual, and retrieval-augmented DAI, while also suggesting future research directions, including agent-based approaches and document-specific foundation models. This paper aims to provide a structured analysis of the state-of-the-art in DAI and its implications for both academic and practical applications.

In this report, we present the latest model of the Gemini family, Gemini 1.5 Pro, a highly compute-efficient multimodal mixture-of-experts model capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. Gemini 1.5 Pro achieves near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improves the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and matches or surpasses Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5 Pro's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 2.1 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.

Multimodal Foundation Models (MMFMs) have shown remarkable performance on various computer vision and natural language processing tasks. However, their performance on particular tasks such as document understanding is still limited. They also require more compute, time, and engineering resources to finetune and deploy compared to traditional, unimodal models. In this report, we present Multimodal Structured Generation, a general framework which constrains the output logits of frozen MMFMs to force them to reason before responding with structured outputs that downstream APIs can parse and use. We provide a detailed account of our approach, including the technical details, theoretical discussions, and final evaluation results in the 2nd Multimodal Foundation Models Challenge hosted by the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference. Our approach achieved the second highest score in the hidden test set for Phase 2 and third highest overall. This shows the method's ability to generalize to unseen tasks. And that simple engineering can beat expensive & complicated modelling steps as we first discussed in our paper, Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation: Business Document Information Extraction as Tool Use. All of our scripts, deployment steps, and evaluation results can be accessed in https://github.com/leloykun/MMFM-Challenge

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal understanding capabilities in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks by integrating visual and textual features. However, under the challenging ten-choice question evaluation paradigm, existing methods still exhibit significant limitations when processing PDF documents with complex layouts and lengthy content. Notably, current mainstream models suffer from a strong bias toward English training data, resulting in suboptimal performance for Japanese and other language scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Japanese PDF document understanding framework that combines multimodal hierarchical reasoning mechanisms with Colqwen-optimized retrieval methods, while innovatively introducing a semantic verification strategy through sub-question decomposition. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework not only significantly enhances the model's deep semantic parsing capability for complex documents, but also exhibits superior robustness in practical application scenarios.

The increasing availability of multimodal data across text, tables, and images presents new challenges for developing models capable of complex cross-modal reasoning. Existing methods for Multimodal Multi-hop Question Answering (MMQA) often suffer from limited reasoning capabilities, reliance on modality conversion, and inadequate alignment between visual and textual representations. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Vision-Language Multimodal Transformer (VLMT), a unified architecture that integrates a transformer-based vision encoder with a sequence-to-sequence language model. VLMT employs a direct token-level injection mechanism to fuse visual and textual inputs within a shared embedding space, eliminating the need for intermediate projection layers. To enhance cross-modal alignment and reasoning, a three-stage pretraining strategy is proposed to progressively align vision-language representations and improve the model's capacity for multimodal understanding. Based on the pretrained backbone, two task-specific modules are instantiated to form a two-stage MMQA framework: a multimodal reranker that predicts document relevance scores and utilizes a relative threshold with top-k strategy for context retrieval, and a multimodal question answering model that generates contextually grounded answers based on the retrieved evidence. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. On MultimodalQA validation set, VLMT-Large achieves 76.5% Exact Match and 80.1% F1, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art by +9.1% in Exact Match and +8.8% in F1. On WebQA, it attains a QA score of 47.6, surpassing prior models such as PERQA by +3.2. These results highlight VLMT's strong capabilities in multimodal reasoning and its potential to advance real-world information retrieval and question answering systems.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel in natural language and visual understanding but are challenged by exacting tasks such as Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) which involve the retrieval of relevant information from document collections to use in shaping answers to questions. We present an extensive training and evaluation framework, M2KR, for KB-VQA. M2KR contains a collection of vision and language tasks which we have incorporated into a single suite of benchmark tasks for training and evaluating general-purpose multi-modal retrievers. We use M2KR to develop PreFLMR, a pre-trained version of the recently developed Fine-grained Late-interaction Multi-modal Retriever (FLMR) approach to KB-VQA, and we report new state-of-the-art results across a range of tasks. We also present investigations into the scaling behaviors of PreFLMR intended to be useful in future developments in general-purpose multi-modal retrievers.

Multi-modal document retrieval is designed to identify and retrieve various forms of multi-modal content, such as figures, tables, charts, and layout information from extensive documents. Despite its significance, there is a notable lack of a robust benchmark to effectively evaluate the performance of systems in multi-modal document retrieval. To address this gap, this work introduces a new benchmark, named as MMDocIR, encompassing two distinct tasks: page-level and layout-level retrieval. The former focuses on localizing the most relevant pages within a long document, while the latter targets the detection of specific layouts, offering a more fine-grained granularity than whole-page analysis. A layout can refer to a variety of elements such as textual paragraphs, equations, figures, tables, or charts. The MMDocIR benchmark comprises a rich dataset featuring expertly annotated labels for 1,685 questions and bootstrapped labels for 173,843 questions, making it a pivotal resource for advancing multi-modal document retrieval for both training and evaluation. Through rigorous experiments, we reveal that (i) visual retrievers significantly outperform their text counterparts, (ii) MMDocIR train set can effectively benefit the training process of multi-modal document retrieval and (iii) text retrievers leveraging on VLM-text perform much better than those using OCR-text. These findings underscores the potential advantages of integrating visual elements for multi-modal document retrieval.

Accurate multi-modal document retrieval is crucial for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), yet existing benchmarks do not fully capture real-world challenges with their current design. We introduce REAL-MM-RAG, an automatically generated benchmark designed to address four key properties essential for real-world retrieval: (i) multi-modal documents, (ii) enhanced difficulty, (iii) Realistic-RAG queries and (iv) accurate labeling. Additionally, we propose a multi-difficulty-level scheme based on query rephrasing to evaluate models' semantic understanding beyond keyword matching. Our benchmark reveals significant model weaknesses, particularly in handling table-heavy documents and robustness to query rephrasing. To mitigate these shortcomings, we curate a rephrased training set and introduce a new finance-focused, table-heavy dataset. Fine-tuning on these datasets enables models to achieve state-of-the-art retrieval performance on REAL-MM-RAG benchmark. Our work offers a better way to evaluate and improve retrieval in multi-modal RAG systems while also providing training data and models that address current limitations.

With the rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their evaluation has become increasingly comprehensive. However, understanding long multimodal content, as a foundational ability for real-world applications, remains underexplored. In this work, we present Needle In A Multimodal Haystack (MM-NIAH), the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate the capability of existing MLLMs to comprehend long multimodal documents. Our benchmark includes three types of evaluation tasks: multimodal retrieval, counting, and reasoning. In each task, the model is required to answer the questions according to different key information scattered throughout the given multimodal document. Evaluating the leading MLLMs on MM-NIAH, we observe that existing models still have significant room for improvement on these tasks, especially on vision-centric evaluation. We hope this work can provide a platform for further research on long multimodal document comprehension and contribute to the advancement of MLLMs. Code and benchmark are released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/MM-NIAH.

Multi-modal retrieval augmented generation (M-RAG) is instrumental for inhibiting hallucinations in large multi-modal models (LMMs) through the use of a factual knowledge base (KB). However, M-RAG introduces new attack vectors for adversaries that aim to disrupt the system by injecting malicious entries into the KB. In this paper, we present the first poisoning attack against M-RAG targeting visual document retrieval applications where the KB contains images of document pages. We propose two attacks, each of which require injecting only a single adversarial image into the KB. Firstly, we propose a universal attack that, for any potential user query, influences the response to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) in the M-RAG system. Secondly, we present a targeted attack against one or a group of user queries, with the goal of spreading targeted misinformation. For both attacks, we use a multi-objective gradient-based adversarial approach to craft the injected image while optimizing for both retrieval and generation. We evaluate our attacks against several visual document retrieval datasets, a diverse set of state-of-the-art retrievers (embedding models) and generators (LMMs), demonstrating the attack effectiveness in both the universal and targeted settings. We additionally present results including commonly used defenses, various attack hyper-parameter settings, ablations, and attack transferability.

Understanding information from visually rich documents remains a significant challenge for traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods. Existing benchmarks predominantly focus on image-based question answering (QA), overlooking the fundamental challenges of efficient retrieval, comprehension, and reasoning within dense visual documents. To bridge this gap, we introduce ViDoSeek, a novel dataset designed to evaluate RAG performance on visually rich documents requiring complex reasoning. Based on it, we identify key limitations in current RAG approaches: (i) purely visual retrieval methods struggle to effectively integrate both textual and visual features, and (ii) previous approaches often allocate insufficient reasoning tokens, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose ViDoRAG, a novel multi-agent RAG framework tailored for complex reasoning across visual documents. ViDoRAG employs a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based hybrid strategy to effectively handle multi-modal retrieval. To further elicit the model's reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative agent workflow incorporating exploration, summarization, and reflection, providing a framework for investigating test-time scaling in RAG domains. Extensive experiments on ViDoSeek validate the effectiveness and generalization of our approach. Notably, ViDoRAG outperforms existing methods by over 10% on the competitive ViDoSeek benchmark.

This paper introduces Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M^2RAG), a benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in leveraging knowledge from multi-modal retrieval documents. The benchmark comprises four tasks: image captioning, multi-modal question answering, multi-modal fact verification, and image reranking. All tasks are set in an open-domain setting, requiring RAG models to retrieve query-relevant information from a multi-modal document collection and use it as input context for RAG modeling. To enhance the context utilization capabilities of MLLMs, we also introduce Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Instruction Tuning (MM-RAIT), an instruction tuning method that optimizes MLLMs within multi-modal contexts. Our experiments show that MM-RAIT improves the performance of RAG systems by enabling them to effectively learn from multi-modal contexts. All data and code are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/M2RAG.

Multimodal LLMs are the natural evolution of LLMs, and enlarge their capabilities so as to work beyond the pure textual modality. As research is being carried out to design novel architectures and vision-and-language adapters, in this paper we concentrate on endowing such models with the capability of answering questions that require external knowledge. Our approach, termed Wiki-LLaVA, aims at integrating an external knowledge source of multimodal documents, which is accessed through a hierarchical retrieval pipeline. Relevant passages, using this approach, are retrieved from the external knowledge source and employed as additional context for the LLM, augmenting the effectiveness and precision of generated dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets tailored for visual question answering with external data and demonstrate the appropriateness of our approach.

Domain-specific QA systems require not just generative fluency but high factual accuracy grounded in structured expert knowledge. While recent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks improve context recall, they struggle with integrating heterogeneous data and maintaining reasoning consistency. To address these challenges, we propose DO-RAG, a scalable and customizable hybrid QA framework that integrates multi-level knowledge graph construction with semantic vector retrieval. Our system employs a novel agentic chain-of-thought architecture to extract structured relationships from unstructured, multimodal documents, constructing dynamic knowledge graphs that enhance retrieval precision. At query time, DO-RAG fuses graph and vector retrieval results to generate context-aware responses, followed by hallucination mitigation via grounded refinement. Experimental evaluations in the database and electrical domains show near-perfect recall and over 94% answer relevancy, with DO-RAG outperforming baseline frameworks by up to 33.38%. By combining traceability, adaptability, and performance efficiency, DO-RAG offers a reliable foundation for multi-domain, high-precision QA at scale.

Training models with longer in-context lengths is a significant challenge for multimodal model due to substantial GPU memory and computational costs. This exploratory study does not present state-of-the-art models; rather, it introduces an innovative method designed to increase in-context text length in multi-modality large language models (MLLMs) efficiently. We present Visualized In-Context Text Processing (VisInContext), which processes long in-context text using visual tokens. This technique significantly reduces GPU memory usage and floating point operations (FLOPs) for both training and inferenceing stage. For instance, our method expands the pre-training in-context text length from 256 to 2048 tokens with nearly same FLOPs for a 56 billion parameter MOE model. Experimental results demonstrate that model trained with VisInContext delivers superior performance on common downstream benchmarks for in-context few-shot evaluation. Additionally, VisInContext is complementary to existing methods for increasing in-context text length and enhances document understanding capabilities, showing great potential in document QA tasks and sequential document retrieval.

Existing benchmarks for evaluating foundation models mainly focus on single-document, text-only tasks. However, they often fail to fully capture the complexity of research workflows, which typically involve interpreting non-textual data and gathering information across multiple documents. To address this gap, we introduce M3SciQA, a multi-modal, multi-document scientific question answering benchmark designed for a more comprehensive evaluation of foundation models. M3SciQA consists of 1,452 expert-annotated questions spanning 70 natural language processing paper clusters, where each cluster represents a primary paper along with all its cited documents, mirroring the workflow of comprehending a single paper by requiring multi-modal and multi-document data. With M3SciQA, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 18 foundation models. Our results indicate that current foundation models still significantly underperform compared to human experts in multi-modal information retrieval and in reasoning across multiple scientific documents. Additionally, we explore the implications of these findings for the future advancement of applying foundation models in multi-modal scientific literature analysis.

Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge to reduce hallucinations and incorporate up-to-date information without retraining. As an essential part of RAG, external knowledge bases are commonly built by extracting structured data from unstructured PDF documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, given the imperfect prediction of OCR and the inherent non-uniform representation of structured data, knowledge bases inevitably contain various OCR noises. In this paper, we introduce OHRBench, the first benchmark for understanding the cascading impact of OCR on RAG systems. OHRBench includes 350 carefully selected unstructured PDF documents from six real-world RAG application domains, along with Q&As derived from multimodal elements in documents, challenging existing OCR solutions used for RAG To better understand OCR's impact on RAG systems, we identify two primary types of OCR noise: Semantic Noise and Formatting Noise and apply perturbation to generate a set of structured data with varying degrees of each OCR noise. Using OHRBench, we first conduct a comprehensive evaluation of current OCR solutions and reveal that none is competent for constructing high-quality knowledge bases for RAG systems. We then systematically evaluate the impact of these two noise types and demonstrate the vulnerability of RAG systems. Furthermore, we discuss the potential of employing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) without OCR in RAG systems. Code: https://github.com/opendatalab/OHR-Bench

Document visual question answering (DocVQA) pipelines that answer questions from documents have broad applications. Existing methods focus on handling single-page documents with multi-modal language models (MLMs), or rely on text-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that uses text extraction tools such as optical character recognition (OCR). However, there are difficulties in applying these methods in real-world scenarios: (a) questions often require information across different pages or documents, where MLMs cannot handle many long documents; (b) documents often have important information in visual elements such as figures, but text extraction tools ignore them. We introduce M3DocRAG, a novel multi-modal RAG framework that flexibly accommodates various document contexts (closed-domain and open-domain), question hops (single-hop and multi-hop), and evidence modalities (text, chart, figure, etc.). M3DocRAG finds relevant documents and answers questions using a multi-modal retriever and an MLM, so that it can efficiently handle single or many documents while preserving visual information. Since previous DocVQA datasets ask questions in the context of a specific document, we also present M3DocVQA, a new benchmark for evaluating open-domain DocVQA over 3,000+ PDF documents with 40,000+ pages. In three benchmarks (M3DocVQA/MMLongBench-Doc/MP-DocVQA), empirical results show that M3DocRAG with ColPali and Qwen2-VL 7B achieves superior performance than many strong baselines, including state-of-the-art performance in MP-DocVQA. We provide comprehensive analyses of different indexing, MLMs, and retrieval models. Lastly, we qualitatively show that M3DocRAG can successfully handle various scenarios, such as when relevant information exists across multiple pages and when answer evidence only exists in images.

Document Understanding is a foundational AI capability with broad applications, and Document Question Answering (DocQA) is a key evaluation task. Traditional methods convert the document into text for processing by Large Language Models (LLMs), but this process strips away critical multi-modal information like figures. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) address this limitation, their constrained input size makes multi-page document comprehension infeasible. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods mitigate this by selecting relevant pages, but they rely solely on semantic relevance, ignoring logical connections between pages and the query, which is essential for reasoning. To this end, we propose MoLoRAG, a logic-aware retrieval framework for multi-modal, multi-page document understanding. By constructing a page graph that captures contextual relationships between pages, a lightweight VLM performs graph traversal to retrieve relevant pages, including those with logical connections often overlooked. This approach combines semantic and logical relevance to deliver more accurate retrieval. After retrieval, the top-K pages are fed into arbitrary LVLMs for question answering. To enhance flexibility, MoLoRAG offers two variants: a training-free solution for easy deployment and a fine-tuned version to improve logical relevance checking. Experiments on four DocQA datasets demonstrate average improvements of 9.68% in accuracy over LVLM direct inference and 7.44% in retrieval precision over baselines. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/WxxShirley/MoLoRAG.

Document Question Answering (DocQA) is a very common task. Existing methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) often prioritize information from a single modal, failing to effectively integrate textual and visual cues. These approaches struggle with complex multi-modal reasoning, limiting their performance on real-world documents. We present MDocAgent (A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understanding), a novel RAG and multi-agent framework that leverages both text and image. Our system employs five specialized agents: a general agent, a critical agent, a text agent, an image agent and a summarizing agent. These agents engage in multi-modal context retrieval, combining their individual insights to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the document's content. This collaborative approach enables the system to synthesize information from both textual and visual components, leading to improved accuracy in question answering. Preliminary experiments on five benchmarks like MMLongBench, LongDocURL demonstrate the effectiveness of our MDocAgent, achieve an average improvement of 12.1% compared to current state-of-the-art method. This work contributes to the development of more robust and comprehensive DocQA systems capable of handling the complexities of real-world documents containing rich textual and visual information. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/MDocAgent.

As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for accurate visual culture understanding is becoming critical. Yet, these models frequently fall short in interpreting cultural nuances effectively. Prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in enhancing cultural understanding in text-only settings, while its application in multimodal scenarios remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAVENEA (Retrieval-Augmented Visual culturE uNdErstAnding), a new benchmark designed to advance visual culture understanding through retrieval, focusing on two tasks: culture-focused visual question answering (cVQA) and culture-informed image captioning (cIC). RAVENEA extends existing datasets by integrating over 10,000 Wikipedia documents curated and ranked by human annotators. With RAVENEA, we train and evaluate seven multimodal retrievers for each image query, and measure the downstream impact of retrieval-augmented inputs across fourteen state-of-the-art VLMs. Our results show that lightweight VLMs, when augmented with culture-aware retrieval, outperform their non-augmented counterparts (by at least 3.2% absolute on cVQA and 6.2% absolute on cIC). This highlights the value of retrieval-augmented methods and culturally inclusive benchmarks for multimodal understanding.

The recent advancements in generative language models have demonstrated their ability to memorize knowledge from documents and recall knowledge to respond to user queries effectively. Building upon this capability, we propose to enable multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to memorize and recall images within their parameters. Given a user query for visual content, the MLLM is anticipated to "recall" the relevant image from its parameters as the response. Achieving this target presents notable challenges, including inbuilt visual memory and visual recall schemes within MLLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce a generative cross-modal retrieval framework, which assigns unique identifier strings to represent images and involves two training steps: learning to memorize and learning to retrieve. The first step focuses on training the MLLM to memorize the association between images and their respective identifiers. The latter step teaches the MLLM to generate the corresponding identifier of the target image, given the textual query input. By memorizing images in MLLMs, we introduce a new paradigm to cross-modal retrieval, distinct from previous discriminative approaches. The experiments demonstrate that the generative paradigm performs effectively and efficiently even with large-scale image candidate sets.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an effective technique that enables large language models (LLMs) to utilize external knowledge sources for generation. However, current RAG systems are solely based on text, rendering it impossible to utilize vision information like layout and images that play crucial roles in real-world multi-modality documents. In this paper, we introduce VisRAG, which tackles this issue by establishing a vision-language model (VLM)-based RAG pipeline. In this pipeline, instead of first parsing the document to obtain text, the document is directly embedded using a VLM as an image and then retrieved to enhance the generation of a VLM. Compared to traditional text-based RAG, VisRAG maximizes the retention and utilization of the data information in the original documents, eliminating the information loss introduced during the parsing process. We collect both open-source and synthetic data to train the retriever in VisRAG and explore a variety of generation methods. Experiments demonstrate that VisRAG outperforms traditional RAG in both the retrieval and generation stages, achieving a 25--39\% end-to-end performance gain over traditional text-based RAG pipeline. Further analysis reveals that VisRAG is effective in utilizing training data and demonstrates strong generalization capability, positioning it as a promising solution for RAG on multi-modality documents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/openbmb/visrag .

With the increasing use of RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG), strong retrieval models have become more important than ever. In healthcare, multimodal retrieval models that combine information from both text and images offer major advantages for many downstream tasks such as question answering, cross-modal retrieval, and multimodal summarization, since medical data often includes both formats. However, there is currently no standard benchmark to evaluate how well these models perform in medical settings. To address this gap, we introduce M3Retrieve, a Multimodal Medical Retrieval Benchmark. M3Retrieve, spans 5 domains,16 medical fields, and 4 distinct tasks, with over 1.2 Million text documents and 164K multimodal queries, all collected under approved licenses. We evaluate leading multimodal retrieval models on this benchmark to explore the challenges specific to different medical specialities and to understand their impact on retrieval performance. By releasing M3Retrieve, we aim to enable systematic evaluation, foster model innovation, and accelerate research toward building more capable and reliable multimodal retrieval systems for medical applications. The dataset and the baselines code are available in this github page https://github.com/AkashGhosh/M3Retrieve.

Contrastive learning has gained widespread adoption for retrieval tasks due to its minimal requirement for manual annotations. However, popular contrastive frameworks typically learn from binary relevance, making them ineffective at incorporating direct fine-grained rankings. In this paper, we curate a large-scale dataset featuring detailed relevance scores for each query-document pair to facilitate future research and evaluation. Subsequently, we propose Generalized Contrastive Learning for Multi-Modal Retrieval and Ranking (GCL), which is designed to learn from fine-grained rankings beyond binary relevance scores. Our results show that GCL achieves a 94.5% increase in NDCG@10 for in-domain and 26.3 to 48.8% increases for cold-start evaluations, all relative to the CLIP baseline and involving ground truth rankings.

Recent multimodal models such as DALL-E and CM3 have achieved remarkable progress in text-to-image and image-to-text generation. However, these models store all learned knowledge (e.g., the appearance of the Eiffel Tower) in the model parameters, requiring increasingly larger models and training data to capture more knowledge. To integrate knowledge in a more scalable and modular way, we propose a retrieval-augmented multimodal model, which enables a base multimodal model (generator) to refer to relevant text and images fetched by a retriever from external memory (e.g., documents on the web). Specifically, for the retriever, we use a pretrained CLIP, and for the generator, we train a CM3 Transformer on the LAION dataset. Our resulting model, named Retrieval-Augmented CM3 (RA-CM3), is the first multimodal model that can retrieve and generate both text and images. We show that RA-CM3 significantly outperforms baseline multimodal models such as DALL-E and CM3 on both image and caption generation tasks (12 FID and 17 CIDEr improvements on MS-COCO), while requiring much less compute for training (<30% of DALL-E). Moreover, we show that RA-CM3 exhibits novel capabilities, such as faithful image generation and multimodal in-context learning (e.g., image generation from demonstrations).

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models (LLMs) by using external knowledge to guide response generation, reducing hallucinations. However, RAG, particularly multi-modal RAG, can introduce new hallucination sources: (i) the retrieval process may select irrelevant pieces (e.g., documents, images) as raw context from the database, and (ii) retrieved images are processed into text-based context via vision-language models (VLMs) or directly used by multi-modal language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4o, which may hallucinate. To address this, we propose a novel framework to evaluate the reliability of multi-modal RAG using two performance measures: (i) the relevancy score (RS), assessing the relevance of retrieved entries to the query, and (ii) the correctness score (CS), evaluating the accuracy of the generated response. We train RS and CS models using a ChatGPT-derived database and human evaluator samples. Results show that both models achieve ~88% accuracy on test data. Additionally, we construct a 5000-sample human-annotated database evaluating the relevancy of retrieved pieces and the correctness of response statements. Our RS model aligns with human preferences 20% more often than CLIP in retrieval, and our CS model matches human preferences ~91% of the time. Finally, we assess various RAG systems' selection and generation performances using RS and CS.

We introduce MRMR, the first expert-level multidisciplinary multimodal retrieval benchmark requiring intensive reasoning. MRMR contains 1,502 queries spanning 23 domains, with positive documents carefully verified by human experts. Compared to prior benchmarks, MRMR introduces three key advancements. First, it challenges retrieval systems across diverse areas of expertise, enabling fine-grained model comparison across domains. Second, queries are reasoning-intensive, with images requiring deeper interpretation such as diagnosing microscopic slides. We further introduce Contradiction Retrieval, a novel task requiring models to identify conflicting concepts. Finally, queries and documents are constructed as image-text interleaved sequences. Unlike earlier benchmarks restricted to single images or unimodal documents, MRMR offers a realistic setting with multi-image queries and mixed-modality corpus documents. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 4 categories of multimodal retrieval systems and 14 frontier models on MRMR. The text embedding model Qwen3-Embedding with LLM-generated image captions achieves the highest performance, highlighting substantial room for improving multimodal retrieval models. Although latest multimodal models such as Ops-MM-Embedding perform competitively on expert-domain queries, they fall short on reasoning-intensive tasks. We believe that MRMR paves the way for advancing multimodal retrieval in more realistic and challenging scenarios.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge to generate a response within a context with improved accuracy and reduced hallucinations. However, multi-modal RAG systems face unique challenges: (i) the retrieval process may select irrelevant entries to user query (e.g., images, documents), and (ii) vision-language models or multi-modal language models like GPT-4o may hallucinate when processing these entries to generate RAG output. In this paper, we aim to address the first challenge, i.e, improving the selection of relevant context from the knowledge-base in retrieval phase of the multi-modal RAG. Specifically, we leverage the relevancy score (RS) measure designed in our previous work for evaluating the RAG performance to select more relevant entries in retrieval process. The retrieval based on embeddings, say CLIP-based embedding, and cosine similarity usually perform poorly particularly for multi-modal data. We show that by using a more advanced relevancy measure, one can enhance the retrieval process by selecting more relevant pieces from the knowledge-base and eliminate the irrelevant pieces from the context by adaptively selecting up-to-k entries instead of fixed number of entries. Our evaluation using COCO dataset demonstrates significant enhancement in selecting relevant context and accuracy of the generated response.

Recent advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have shown remarkable performance in enhancing response accuracy and relevance by integrating external knowledge into generative models. However, existing RAG methods primarily focus on providing text-only answers, even in multimodal retrieval-augmented generation scenarios. In this work, we introduce the Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Generation (MRAMG) task, which aims to generate answers that combine both text and images, fully leveraging the multimodal data within a corpus. Despite the importance of this task, there is a notable absence of a comprehensive benchmark to effectively evaluate MRAMG performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce the MRAMG-Bench, a carefully curated, human-annotated dataset comprising 4,346 documents, 14,190 images, and 4,800 QA pairs, sourced from three categories: Web Data, Academic Papers, and Lifestyle. The dataset incorporates diverse difficulty levels and complex multi-image scenarios, providing a robust foundation for evaluating multimodal generation tasks. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, our MRAMG-Bench incorporates a comprehensive suite of both statistical and LLM-based metrics, enabling a thorough analysis of the performance of popular generative models in the MRAMG task. Besides, we propose an efficient multimodal answer generation framework that leverages both LLMs and MLLMs to generate multimodal responses. Our datasets are available at: https://huggingface.co/MRAMG.

Multimodal retrieval is becoming a crucial component of modern AI applications, yet its evaluation lags behind the demands of more realistic and challenging scenarios. Existing benchmarks primarily probe surface-level semantic correspondence (e.g., object-text matching) while failing to assess the deeper reasoning required to capture complex relationships between visual and textual information. To address this gap, we introduce MR^2-Bench, a reasoning-intensive benchmark for multimodal retrieval. MR^2-Bench presents the following critical values: 1) all tasks are reasoning-driven, going beyond shallow matching to effectively assess models' capacity for logical, spatial, and causal inference; 2) it features diverse multimodal data, such as natural images, diagrams, and visual puzzles, enabling comprehensive evaluation across content types; 3) it supports complex queries and documents containing multiple images and covers diverse retrieval scenarios, more accurately reflecting real-world applications. Our benchmark contains 1,309 curated queries, derived either from manual collection and annotation or from selective consolidation of public datasets. Despite achieving strong results on existing benchmarks, current state-of-the-art models still struggle on MR^2-Bench: for example, the leading Seed1.6-Embedding model attains a Recall@1 of 77.78 on MMEB, but only 9.91 on MR^2-Bench. This substantial performance gap highlights both the increased challenge posed by our benchmark and the pressing need for further advances in reasoning-intensive multimodal retrieval. The dataset and evaluation code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/VectorSpaceLab/MR2-Bench.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is becoming increasingly essential for Question Answering (QA) in the financial sector, where accurate and contextually grounded insights from complex public disclosures are crucial. However, existing financial RAG systems face two significant challenges: (1) they struggle to process heterogeneous data formats, such as text, tables, and figures; and (2) they encounter difficulties in balancing general-domain applicability with company-specific adaptation. To overcome these challenges, we present VeritasFi, an innovative hybrid RAG framework that incorporates a multi-modal preprocessing pipeline alongside a cutting-edge two-stage training strategy for its re-ranking component. VeritasFi enhances financial QA through three key innovations: (1) A multi-modal preprocessing pipeline that seamlessly transforms heterogeneous data into a coherent, machine-readable format. (2) A tripartite hybrid retrieval engine that operates in parallel, combining deep multi-path retrieval over a semantically indexed document corpus, real-time data acquisition through tool utilization, and an expert-curated memory bank for high-frequency questions, ensuring comprehensive scope, accuracy, and efficiency. (3) A two-stage training strategy for the document re-ranker, which initially constructs a general, domain-specific model using anonymized data, followed by rapid fine-tuning on company-specific data for targeted applications. By integrating our proposed designs, VeritasFi presents a groundbreaking framework that greatly enhances the adaptability and robustness of financial RAG systems, providing a scalable solution for both general-domain and company-specific QA tasks. Code accompanying this work is available at https://github.com/simplew4y/VeritasFi.git.

We introduce Qwen3-VL, the most capable vision-language model in the Qwen series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. It natively supports interleaved contexts of up to 256K tokens, seamlessly integrating text, images, and video. The model family includes both dense (2B/4B/8B/32B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B/235B-A22B) variants to accommodate diverse latency-quality trade-offs. Qwen3-VL delivers three core pillars: (i) markedly stronger pure-text understanding, surpassing comparable text-only backbones in several cases; (ii) robust long-context comprehension with a native 256K-token window for both text and interleaved multimodal inputs, enabling faithful retention, retrieval, and cross-referencing across long documents and videos; and (iii) advanced multimodal reasoning across single-image, multi-image, and video tasks, demonstrating leading performance on comprehensive evaluations such as MMMU and visual-math benchmarks (e.g., MathVista and MathVision). Architecturally, we introduce three key upgrades: (i) an enhanced interleaved-MRoPE for stronger spatial-temporal modeling across images and video; (ii) DeepStack integration, which effectively leverages multi-level ViT features to tighten vision-language alignment; and (iii) text-based time alignment for video, evolving from T-RoPE to explicit textual timestamp alignment for more precise temporal grounding. Under comparable token budgets and latency constraints, Qwen3-VL achieves superior performance in both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. We envision Qwen3-VL serving as a foundational engine for image-grounded reasoning, agentic decision-making, and multimodal code intelligence in real-world workflows.

Leveraging large language models in real-world settings often entails a need to utilize domain-specific data and tools in order to follow the complex regulations that need to be followed for acceptable use. Within financial sectors, modern enterprises increasingly rely on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to address complex compliance requirements in financial document workflows. However, existing solutions struggle to account for the inherent heterogeneity of data (e.g., text, tables, diagrams) and evolving nature of regulatory standards used in financial filings, leading to compromised accuracy in critical information extraction. We propose the FinSage framework as a solution, utilizing a multi-aspect RAG framework tailored for regulatory compliance analysis in multi-modal financial documents. FinSage introduces three innovative components: (1) a multi-modal pre-processing pipeline that unifies diverse data formats and generates chunk-level metadata summaries, (2) a multi-path sparse-dense retrieval system augmented with query expansion (HyDE) and metadata-aware semantic search, and (3) a domain-specialized re-ranking module fine-tuned via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to prioritize compliance-critical content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FinSage achieves an impressive recall of 92.51% on 75 expert-curated questions derived from surpasses the best baseline method on the FinanceBench question answering datasets by 24.06% in accuracy. Moreover, FinSage has been successfully deployed as financial question-answering agent in online meetings, where it has already served more than 1,200 people.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal LLMs have been remarkable. However, these models still rely solely on their parametric knowledge, which limits their ability to generate up-to-date information and increases the risk of producing erroneous content. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) partially mitigates these challenges by incorporating external data sources, yet the reliance on databases and retrieval systems can introduce irrelevant or inaccurate documents, ultimately undermining both performance and reasoning quality. In this paper, we propose Multi-Modal Knowledge-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MMKB-RAG), a novel multi-modal RAG framework that leverages the inherent knowledge boundaries of models to dynamically generate semantic tags for the retrieval process. This strategy enables the joint filtering of retrieved documents, retaining only the most relevant and accurate references. Extensive experiments on knowledge-based visual question-answering tasks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach: on the E-VQA dataset, our method improves performance by +4.2% on the Single-Hop subset and +0.4% on the full dataset, while on the InfoSeek dataset, it achieves gains of +7.8% on the Unseen-Q subset, +8.2% on the Unseen-E subset, and +8.1% on the full dataset. These results highlight significant enhancements in both accuracy and robustness over the current state-of-the-art MLLM and RAG frameworks.

Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) refers to answering a question about an image whose answer does not lie in the image. This paper presents a new pipeline for KI-VQA tasks, consisting of a retriever and a reader. First, we introduce DEDR, a symmetric dual encoding dense retrieval framework in which documents and queries are encoded into a shared embedding space using uni-modal (textual) and multi-modal encoders. We introduce an iterative knowledge distillation approach that bridges the gap between the representation spaces in these two encoders. Extensive evaluation on two well-established KI-VQA datasets, i.e., OK-VQA and FVQA, suggests that DEDR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 11.6% and 30.9% on OK-VQA and FVQA, respectively. Utilizing the passages retrieved by DEDR, we further introduce MM-FiD, an encoder-decoder multi-modal fusion-in-decoder model, for generating a textual answer for KI-VQA tasks. MM-FiD encodes the question, the image, and each retrieved passage separately and uses all passages jointly in its decoder. Compared to competitive baselines in the literature, this approach leads to 5.5% and 8.5% improvements in terms of question answering accuracy on OK-VQA and FVQA, respectively.

Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (MMRAG) is a powerful approach to question-answering over multimodal documents. A key challenge with evaluating MMRAG is the paucity of high-quality datasets matching the question styles and modalities of interest. In light of this, we propose SMMQG, a synthetic data generation framework. SMMQG leverages interplay between a retriever, large language model (LLM) and large multimodal model (LMM) to generate question and answer pairs directly from multimodal documents, with the questions conforming to specified styles and modalities. We use SMMQG to generate an MMRAG dataset of 1024 questions over Wikipedia documents and evaluate state-of-the-art models using it, revealing insights into model performance that are attainable only through style- and modality-specific evaluation data. Next, we measure the quality of data produced by SMMQG via a human study. We find that the quality of our synthetic data is on par with the quality of the crowdsourced benchmark MMQA and that downstream evaluation results using both datasets strongly concur.

Mixed modality search -- retrieving information across a heterogeneous corpus composed of images, texts, and multimodal documents -- is an important yet underexplored real-world application. In this work, we investigate how contrastive vision-language models, such as CLIP, perform on the mixed modality search task. Our analysis reveals a critical limitation: these models exhibit a pronounced modality gap in the embedding space, where image and text embeddings form distinct clusters, leading to intra-modal ranking bias and inter-modal fusion failure. To address this issue, we propose GR-CLIP, a lightweight post-hoc calibration method that removes the modality gap in CLIP's embedding space. Evaluated on MixBench -- the first benchmark specifically designed for mixed modality search -- GR-CLIP improves NDCG@10 by up to 26 percentage points over CLIP, surpasses recent vision-language generative embedding models by 4 percentage points, while using 75x less compute.