ViSAR: Training-Free Adaptive-$k$ Retrieval for Visual Document Question Answering

Abstract:Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) often leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), where late-interaction encoders are commonly used to identify document pages relevant to a user query, before answer generation by a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM). Existing approaches typically retrieve a fixed top-$k$ number of pages regardless of query complexity, which increases LVLM latency and may degrade answer accuracy. We introduce ViSAR (Visual Semantic Activation Retrieval), a training-free adaptive-$k$ retrieval method for late-interaction visual document retrieval. ViSAR operates directly in the embedding space to construct a query-conditioned page-level similarity matrix that highlights query-relevant semantics and dynamically determines the number of pages to retrieve. Across multiple encoders and LVLMs, ViSAR retrieves compact, query-adapted page sets that reduce RAG latency by up to 58.7\%, while maintaining or improving answer accuracy compared with fixed top-$k$ and adaptive retrieval heuristics. Furthermore, we show that the similarity matrix structure correlates with answer accuracy, suggesting future directions for retrieval quality-aware document understanding.

Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2609.02486 [cs.IR]

(or arXiv:2609.02486v1 [cs.IR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.02486 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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