aiqbench analysis
TrioRAG demonstrates that eliminating expensive corpus-level graphs can significantly accelerate multimodal retrieval while maintaining performance through late fusion of text, image, and VLM-enhanced signals. The introduction of the AutoQA benchmark highlights critical challenges in reasoning across manuals when grounded in noisy, out-of-corpus web images, where text-derived queries prove more robust than direct image retrieval. This work advances efficient, scalable architectures for cross-document question answering without relying on heavy graph infrastructure.
Less Is More: Graph-free Multimodal RAG via Multi-signal Late Fusion
arXiv:2609.19417v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely used for multimodal, cross-document question answering. However, building corpus-level graphs is expensive, slow to query, and difficult to maintain. We present TrioRAG, a graph-free multimodal framework that integrates evidence from three complementary signals: the question, the anchor image, and a VLM-enhanced query generated from both. Each signal retrieves independently over a shared multi-vector index of page text and page images, and the results are combined through late fusion. Further, we introduce AutoQA, a multimodal automotive benchmark whose questions are grounded in noisy, web-sourced images rather than clean document-sourced figures. Its questions require reasoning across manuals. We position it as a model-curated testbed rather than a human-validated gold standard. Across three benchmarks, TrioRAG matches or outperforms graph-based systems while reducing total cost and accelerating per-query inference by 1.6-2.3 times. By construction, AutoQA grounds its questions in out-of-corpus web images. In this setting image retrieval reaches only 19.3% document-level recall, while text-derived signals, especially the VLM-enhanced query, keep retrieval robust.
Abstract:Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely used for multimodal, cross-document question answering. However, building corpus-level graphs is expensive, slow to query, and difficult to maintain. We present TrioRAG, a graph-free multimodal framework that integrates evidence from three complementary signals: the question, the anchor image, and a VLM-enhanced query generated from both. Each signal retrieves independently over a shared multi-vector index of page text and page images, and the results are combined through late fusion. Further, we introduce AutoQA, a multimodal automotive benchmark whose questions are grounded in noisy, web-sourced images rather than clean document-sourced figures. Its questions require reasoning across manuals. We position it as a model-curated testbed rather than a human-validated gold standard. Across three benchmarks, TrioRAG matches or outperforms graph-based systems while reducing total cost and accelerating per-query inference by 1.6-2.3 times. By construction, AutoQA grounds its questions in out-of-corpus web images. In this setting image retrieval reaches only 19.3% document-level recall, while text-derived signals, especially the VLM-enhanced query, keep retrieval robust.
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2609.19417 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2609.19417v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.19417 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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