aiqbench analysis
UniversalRAG addresses a critical bottleneck in current Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems by enabling dynamic retrieval across heterogeneous data modalities and granularities rather than relying on text-only or single-modality corpora. By introducing modality-aware routing to mitigate the "modality gap," this framework theoretically justifies its ability to retrieve more accurate knowledge sources tailored to specific query complexities, validated across ten diverse benchmarks. This advancement represents a significant step toward building robust AI agents capable of grounding responses in real-world multimodal contexts without performance degradation from forced unification.
UniversalRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Corpora of Diverse Modalities and Granularities
arXiv:2504.20734v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries. However, most existing approaches are limited to a text-only corpus, and while recent efforts have extended RAG to other modalities such as images and videos, they typically operate over a single modality-specific corpus. In contrast, real-world queries vary widely in the type of knowledge they require, which a single type of knowledge source cannot address. To address this, we introduce UniversalRAG, an any-to-any RAG framework designed to retrieve and integrate knowledge from heterogeneous sources with diverse modalities and granularities. Specifically, motivated by the observation that forcing all modalities into a unified representation space derived from a single aggregated corpus causes a modality gap, where the retrieval tends to favor items from the same modality as the query, we propose modality-aware routing, which dynamically identifies the most appropriate modality-specific corpus and performs targeted retrieval within it, and further justify its effectiveness with a theoretical analysis. Moreover, beyond modality, we organize each modality into multiple granularity levels, enabling fine-tuned retrieval tailored to the complexity and scope of the query. We validate UniversalRAG on 10 benchmarks of multiple modalities, showing its superiority over various modality-specific and unified baselines.
Abstract:Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries. However, most existing approaches are limited to a text-only corpus, and while recent efforts have extended RAG to other modalities such as images and videos, they typically operate over a single modality-specific corpus. In contrast, real-world queries vary widely in the type of knowledge they require, which a single type of knowledge source cannot address. To address this, we introduce UniversalRAG, an any-to-any RAG framework designed to retrieve and integrate knowledge from heterogeneous sources with diverse modalities and granularities. Specifically, motivated by the observation that forcing all modalities into a unified representation space derived from a single aggregated corpus causes a modality gap, where the retrieval tends to favor items from the same modality as the query, we propose modality-aware routing, which dynamically identifies the most appropriate modality-specific corpus and performs targeted retrieval within it, and further justify its effectiveness with a theoretical analysis. Moreover, beyond modality, we organize each modality into multiple granularity levels, enabling fine-tuned retrieval tailored to the complexity and scope of the query. We validate UniversalRAG on 10 benchmarks of multiple modalities, showing its superiority over various modality-specific and unified baselines.
ACL 2026. Project page : this https URL
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2504.20734 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2504.20734v5 [cs.CL] for this version)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 241 words
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