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Main Authors: Du, Ruoshuang, Sun, Xin, Liu, Qiang, Song, Bowen, Chen, Zhongqi, Wang, Weiqiang, Wang, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00511
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author Du, Ruoshuang
Sun, Xin
Liu, Qiang
Song, Bowen
Chen, Zhongqi
Wang, Weiqiang
Wang, Liang
author_facet Du, Ruoshuang
Sun, Xin
Liu, Qiang
Song, Bowen
Chen, Zhongqi
Wang, Weiqiang
Wang, Liang
contents Visual Question Answering systems face reliability issues due to hallucinations, where models generate answers misaligned with visual input or factual knowledge. While Retrieval Augmented Generation frameworks mitigate this issue by incorporating external knowledge, static retrieval often introduces irrelevant or conflicting content, particularly in visual RAG settings where visually similar but semantically incorrect evidence may be retrieved. To address this, we propose Multimodal Adaptive RAG (MMA-RAG), which dynamically assesses the confidence in the internal knowledge of the model to decide whether to incorporate the retrieved external information into the generation process. Central to MMA-RAG is a decision classifier trained through a layer-wise analysis, which leverages joint internal visual and textual representations to guide the use of reverse image retrieval. Experiments demonstrated that the model achieves a significant improvement in response performance in three VQA datasets. Meanwhile, ablation studies highlighted the importance of internal representations in adaptive retrieval decisions. In general, the experimental results demonstrated that MMA-RAG effectively balances external knowledge utilization and inference robustness in diverse multimodal scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00511
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Adaptive Retrieval Augmented Generation through Internal Representation Learning
Du, Ruoshuang
Sun, Xin
Liu, Qiang
Song, Bowen
Chen, Zhongqi
Wang, Weiqiang
Wang, Liang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Visual Question Answering systems face reliability issues due to hallucinations, where models generate answers misaligned with visual input or factual knowledge. While Retrieval Augmented Generation frameworks mitigate this issue by incorporating external knowledge, static retrieval often introduces irrelevant or conflicting content, particularly in visual RAG settings where visually similar but semantically incorrect evidence may be retrieved. To address this, we propose Multimodal Adaptive RAG (MMA-RAG), which dynamically assesses the confidence in the internal knowledge of the model to decide whether to incorporate the retrieved external information into the generation process. Central to MMA-RAG is a decision classifier trained through a layer-wise analysis, which leverages joint internal visual and textual representations to guide the use of reverse image retrieval. Experiments demonstrated that the model achieves a significant improvement in response performance in three VQA datasets. Meanwhile, ablation studies highlighted the importance of internal representations in adaptive retrieval decisions. In general, the experimental results demonstrated that MMA-RAG effectively balances external knowledge utilization and inference robustness in diverse multimodal scenarios.
title Multimodal Adaptive Retrieval Augmented Generation through Internal Representation Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00511