Fine-Grained Knowledge Structuring and Retrieval for Visual Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Zhengxuan, Wu, Yin, Luo, Yuyu, Tang, Nan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhang, Zhengxuan
Wu, Yin
Luo, Yuyu
Tang, Nan
author_facet Zhang, Zhengxuan
Wu, Yin
Luo, Yuyu
Tang, Nan
contents Visual Question Answering (VQA) focuses on providing answers to natural language questions by utilizing information from images. Although cutting-edge multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4o achieve strong performance on VQA tasks, they frequently fall short in accessing domain-specific or the latest knowledge. To mitigate this issue, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) leveraging external knowledge bases (KBs), referred to as KB-VQA, emerges as a promising approach. Nevertheless, conventional unimodal retrieval techniques, which translate images into textual descriptions, often result in the loss of critical visual details. To address these challenges, this study presents two key innovations. First, we introduce fine-grained knowledge units that consist of multimodal data fragments (e.g. text fragments, entity images, and so on) in a structured manner. Rather than merely refining retrieval mechanisms, we prioritize the systematic organization and management of these knowledge units, ensuring that the structuring process itself enhances retrieval quality. Second, we propose a knowledge unit retrieval-augmented generation framework (KU-RAG) that seamlessly integrates fine-grained retrieval with MLLMs. Our KU-RAG framework not only ensures precise retrieval of relevant knowledge but also enhances reasoning capabilities through a knowledge correction chain. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing KB-VQA methods across four benchmarks, achieving an average improvement of approximately 3% and up to 11% in the best case.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_20964
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fine-Grained Knowledge Structuring and Retrieval for Visual Question Answering
Zhang, Zhengxuan
Wu, Yin
Luo, Yuyu
Tang, Nan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Visual Question Answering (VQA) focuses on providing answers to natural language questions by utilizing information from images. Although cutting-edge multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4o achieve strong performance on VQA tasks, they frequently fall short in accessing domain-specific or the latest knowledge. To mitigate this issue, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) leveraging external knowledge bases (KBs), referred to as KB-VQA, emerges as a promising approach. Nevertheless, conventional unimodal retrieval techniques, which translate images into textual descriptions, often result in the loss of critical visual details. To address these challenges, this study presents two key innovations. First, we introduce fine-grained knowledge units that consist of multimodal data fragments (e.g. text fragments, entity images, and so on) in a structured manner. Rather than merely refining retrieval mechanisms, we prioritize the systematic organization and management of these knowledge units, ensuring that the structuring process itself enhances retrieval quality. Second, we propose a knowledge unit retrieval-augmented generation framework (KU-RAG) that seamlessly integrates fine-grained retrieval with MLLMs. Our KU-RAG framework not only ensures precise retrieval of relevant knowledge but also enhances reasoning capabilities through a knowledge correction chain. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing KB-VQA methods across four benchmarks, achieving an average improvement of approximately 3% and up to 11% in the best case.
title Fine-Grained Knowledge Structuring and Retrieval for Visual Question Answering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20964