AutothinkRAG: Complexity-Aware Control of Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Image-Text Interaction

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yang, Jiashu, Zhang, Chi, Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu, Cheng, Xuxin, Liu, Cao, Zeng, Ke, Jia, Xu, Cai, Xunliang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Yang, Jiashu
Zhang, Chi
Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Cheng, Xuxin
Liu, Cao
Zeng, Ke
Jia, Xu
Cai, Xunliang
author_facet Yang, Jiashu
Zhang, Chi
Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Cheng, Xuxin
Liu, Cao
Zeng, Ke
Jia, Xu
Cai, Xunliang
contents Multimodal document question answering requires retrieving dispersed evidence from visually rich long documents and performing reliable reasoning over heterogeneous information. Existing multimodal RAG systems remain limited by two bottlenecks: static retrieval that ignores query complexity, and end-to-end Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that couple visual perception with logical reasoning, leading to inefficient computation and unstable answer generation. We propose AutoThinkRAG, a complexity-aware inference architecture for multimodal document QA. It has two components: (1) a Query Complexity Router that analyzes query difficulty and structure to adaptively select retrieval and reasoning paths; and (2) a Perception--Reasoning Decoupling architecture that uses a lightweight VLM as a high-fidelity visual interpreter to convert query-relevant visual cues into textual representations, which are then passed to an LLM for logical reasoning and answer synthesis. This design improves both efficiency and robustness, especially on long-document and unanswerable queries. Experiments on DocBench and MMLongBench show that AutoThinkRAG achieves 82.13\% and 51.29\% overall accuracy, respectively, while reducing per-query token consumption by 18.9\% and monetary cost by 18.2\%. Further analyses show that the gains are most pronounced on complex queries requiring adaptive retrieval and multi-step reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_05551
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AutothinkRAG: Complexity-Aware Control of Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Image-Text Interaction
Yang, Jiashu
Zhang, Chi
Wuerkaixi, Abudukelimu
Cheng, Xuxin
Liu, Cao
Zeng, Ke
Jia, Xu
Cai, Xunliang
Information Retrieval
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal document question answering requires retrieving dispersed evidence from visually rich long documents and performing reliable reasoning over heterogeneous information. Existing multimodal RAG systems remain limited by two bottlenecks: static retrieval that ignores query complexity, and end-to-end Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that couple visual perception with logical reasoning, leading to inefficient computation and unstable answer generation. We propose AutoThinkRAG, a complexity-aware inference architecture for multimodal document QA. It has two components: (1) a Query Complexity Router that analyzes query difficulty and structure to adaptively select retrieval and reasoning paths; and (2) a Perception--Reasoning Decoupling architecture that uses a lightweight VLM as a high-fidelity visual interpreter to convert query-relevant visual cues into textual representations, which are then passed to an LLM for logical reasoning and answer synthesis. This design improves both efficiency and robustness, especially on long-document and unanswerable queries. Experiments on DocBench and MMLongBench show that AutoThinkRAG achieves 82.13\% and 51.29\% overall accuracy, respectively, while reducing per-query token consumption by 18.9\% and monetary cost by 18.2\%. Further analyses show that the gains are most pronounced on complex queries requiring adaptive retrieval and multi-step reasoning.
title AutothinkRAG: Complexity-Aware Control of Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Image-Text Interaction
topic Information Retrieval
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05551