NICO-RAG: Multimodal Hypergraph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Understanding the Nicotine Public Health Crisis

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Serna-Aguilera, Manuel, Anderes, Raegan, Dobbs, Page, Luu, Khoa
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Serna-Aguilera, Manuel
Anderes, Raegan
Dobbs, Page
Luu, Khoa
author_facet Serna-Aguilera, Manuel
Anderes, Raegan
Dobbs, Page
Luu, Khoa
contents The nicotine addiction public health crisis continues to be pervasive. In this century alone, the tobacco industry has released and marketed new products in an aggressive effort to lure new and young customers for life. Such innovations and product development, namely flavored nicotine or tobacco such as nicotine pouches, have undone years of anti-tobacco campaign work. Past work is limited both in scope and in its ability to connect large-scale data points. Thus, we introduce the Nicotine Innovation Counter-Offensive (NICO) Dataset to provide public health researchers with over 200,000 multimodal samples, including images and text descriptions, on 55 tobacco and nicotine product brands. In addition, to provide public health researchers with factual connections across a large-scale dataset, we propose NICO-RAG, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that can retrieve image features without incurring the high-cost of language models, as well as the added cost of processing image tokens with large-scale datasets such as NICO. At construction time, NICO-RAG organizes image- and text-extracted entities and relations into hypergraphs to produce as factual responses as possible. This joint multimodal knowledge representation enables NICO-RAG to retrieve images for query answering not only by visual similarity but also by the semantic similarity of image descriptions. Experimentals show that without needing to process additional tokens from images for over 100 questions, NICO-RAG performs comparably to the state-of-the-art RAG method adapted for images.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02047
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NICO-RAG: Multimodal Hypergraph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Understanding the Nicotine Public Health Crisis
Serna-Aguilera, Manuel
Anderes, Raegan
Dobbs, Page
Luu, Khoa
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The nicotine addiction public health crisis continues to be pervasive. In this century alone, the tobacco industry has released and marketed new products in an aggressive effort to lure new and young customers for life. Such innovations and product development, namely flavored nicotine or tobacco such as nicotine pouches, have undone years of anti-tobacco campaign work. Past work is limited both in scope and in its ability to connect large-scale data points. Thus, we introduce the Nicotine Innovation Counter-Offensive (NICO) Dataset to provide public health researchers with over 200,000 multimodal samples, including images and text descriptions, on 55 tobacco and nicotine product brands. In addition, to provide public health researchers with factual connections across a large-scale dataset, we propose NICO-RAG, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that can retrieve image features without incurring the high-cost of language models, as well as the added cost of processing image tokens with large-scale datasets such as NICO. At construction time, NICO-RAG organizes image- and text-extracted entities and relations into hypergraphs to produce as factual responses as possible. This joint multimodal knowledge representation enables NICO-RAG to retrieve images for query answering not only by visual similarity but also by the semantic similarity of image descriptions. Experimentals show that without needing to process additional tokens from images for over 100 questions, NICO-RAG performs comparably to the state-of-the-art RAG method adapted for images.
title NICO-RAG: Multimodal Hypergraph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Understanding the Nicotine Public Health Crisis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02047