Challenge: Recent advances in using retrieval components over external knowledge sources have shown impressive results for a variety of downstream tasks in natural language processing.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented multi-modal transformer architecture for embedding images and captions in the same space.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves visual question answering over strong baselines and hot-swapping indices.

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Seeing Beyond: Enhancing Visual Question Answering with Multi-Modal Retrieval (2025.coling-industry)

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Challenge: Multi-modal Large language models still suffer from model hallucination and lack of specific knowledge when answering challenging questions.
Approach: They propose to use a multi-modal retrieval augmented generation method to integrate knowledge from all modalities into a model to enable alignment between query and knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves significant performance improvement on the VQA dataset.
MORE: Multi-mOdal REtrieval Augmented Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Language Models (LLMs) have gained increasing prominence in artificial intelligence, especially Large Language Model (LLm) due to the well-recognized reporting bias, the recording of commonsense information is significantly less than its existence in reality.
Approach: They propose a Multi-mOdal REtrieval framework to leverage both text and images to enhance commonsense ability of language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework can leverage both text and images to enhance commonsense ability of language models.
Open-Ended Visual Question Answering by Multi-Modal Domain Adaptation (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to visual question answering (VQA) are not suitable for real-world applications.
Approach: They propose a supervised multi-modal domain adaptation method for visual question answering in images that exploits supervised domain adaptation.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark VQA 2.0 and VizWiz datasets.
Towards Multi-Modal Text-Image Retrieval to improve Human Reading (2021.naacl-srw)

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Challenge: In primary school, children's books, as well as in modern language learning apps, multi-modal learning strategies like illustrations of terms and phrases are used to support reading comprehension.
Approach: They propose to use multi-modal transformers to train multi-dimensional models on text-image retrieval to support a user's reading comprehension of arbitrary text.
Outcome: The proposed model performs poorly because of the short and relatively simple textual data that the current models are trained with.
Retrieve Fast, Rerank Smart: Cooperative and Joint Approaches for Improved Cross-Modal Retrieval (2022.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Current approaches to cross-modal retrieval process text and visual input jointly . current approaches are pretrained from scratch and suffer from huge retrieval latency and inefficiency issues .
Approach: They propose a cooperative retrieve-and-rerank framework that turns pretrained text-image multi-modal models into efficient retrieval models.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves retrieval performance over current approaches . it uses twin networks to encode all items of a corpus and a cross-encoder component for a more nuanced ranking .
End-to-end Knowledge Retrieval with Multi-modal Queries (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: a new task is proposed to learn knowledge retrieval with multimodal queries . a vision-language model can retrieve knowledge using images and text inputs .
Approach: They propose a task for vision-language models to retrieve knowledge with multi-modal queries . they propose reViz, a model that integrates content from both text and image queries based on a multimodal query task .
Outcome: The proposed task performs better under zero-shot settings than previous work on cross-modal retrieval.
WikiSeeker: Rethinking the Role of Vision-Language Models in Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering rely on images as the retrieval key, and often overlook or misplace the role of Vision-Language Models (VLMs)
Approach: They propose a multi-modal RAG framework that assigns VLMs two specialized agents: a Refiner and an Inspector.
Outcome: Experiments on EVQA, InfoSeek, and M2KR show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements in both retrieval accuracy and answer quality.
RAMQA: A Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Modal Question Answering (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing ranking methods rely on small encoder-based ranking models, which are incompatible with modern decoder--based generative large language models (LLMs) Existing methods based on small LLaVA rankers are incompatible with advanced LLMs.
Approach: They propose a framework that combines learning-to-rank methods with generative permutation-enhanced ranking techniques.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on two benchmarks, WebQA and MultiModalQA, showing significant improvements over baselines.
Pre-training Cross-Modal Retrieval by Expansive Lexicon-Patch Alignment (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Recent large-scale vision-language pre-training relies on image-text global alignment by contrastive learning and is further boosted by fine-grained alignment in a weakly contrastive manner for cross-modal retrieval.
Approach: They propose expansive lexicon-patch alignment (ELA) to align image patches with a vocabulary rather than only the words explicitly in the text for annotation-free alignment and information augmentation.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on cross-modal retrieval and can learn representative fine-grained information.
Unifying Text, Tables, and Images for Multimodal Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to multimodal question answering rely on single-modal or bi-modal models, which limit their ability to integrate information across all modalities.
Approach: They propose a framework that unifies three different input modalities into a text-to-text format by employing position-enhanced table linearization and diversified image captioning techniques.
Outcome: The proposed framework unifies three input modalities into a text-to-text format using position-enhanced table linearization and diversified image captioning techniques.

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