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.

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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.
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EchoSight: Advancing Visual-Language Models with Wiki Knowledge (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge-based visual question answering systems struggle with these tasks due to limited integration of external knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework that enables large language models to answer visual questions requiring encyclopedic knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves retrieval outcomes and accuracy of knowledge-based visual question answering tasks.
Multi-Level Information Retrieval Augmented Generation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Knowledge-Aware Visual Question Answering about Entity tasks require two separate steps to generate accurate answers.
Approach: They propose a multi-level information RAG approach that enhances answer generation through entity retrieval and query expansion.
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MM-Reasoner: A Multi-Modal Knowledge-Aware Framework for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent knowledge-based visual question answering approaches miss visual information captured by captions and cannot fully utilize the visual information required to answer the question.
Approach: They propose a framework that extracts visual information from an image and prompts an LLM to extract query-specific knowledge from the extracted textual information.
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OMGM: Orchestrate Multiple Granularities and Modalities for Efficient Multimodal Retrieval (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering lack multimodal retrieval . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization and reasoning capabilities in text-based systems.
Approach: They propose a multimodal vision-language retrieval-augmented generation system that harmonizes multiple modalities and modality to enhance retrieval.
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Cross-Modal Retrieval Augmentation for Multi-Modal Classification (2021.findings-emnlp)

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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.
ViDoRAG: Visual Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Dynamic Iterative Reasoning Agents (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on image-based question answering (QA) but ignore the fundamental challenges of efficient retrieval, comprehension, and reasoning within dense visual documents.
Approach: They propose a novel multi-agent RAG framework tailored for complex reasoning across visual documents that employs a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based hybrid strategy to handle multi-modal retrieval.
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MDocRAG-RL: Empowering Multi-Modal Document RAG via Complex Visual Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing RAG systems produce suboptimal embeddings and naively insert images into context without adequate visual perception, limiting reasoning capabilities.
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VLM Is a Strong Reranker: Advancing Multimodal Retrieval-augmented Generation via Knowledge-enhanced Reranking and Noise-injected Training (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a significant drawback of Vision-language Models is their reliance on static training data, leading to outdated information and limited contextual awareness.
Approach: They propose a framework with knowledge-enhanced reranking and noise-injected training to improve the VLM's ranking ability.
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RG-VQA: Leveraging Retriever-Generator Pipelines for Knowledge Intensive Visual Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to improve the reasoning capabilities of VQA systems are limited due to complexity of graph neural networks and end-to-end training.
Approach: They propose a method to integrate Dense Passage Retrievers with Vision Language Models to boost the reasoning capabilities of VQA systems.
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