Navigating Massive Visual Context in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Multimodal Memory Graph
Qiuchen Wang, Shihang Wang, Yu Zeng, Qiang Zhang, Fanrui Zhang, Zhuoning Guo, Bosi Zhang, Wenxuan Huang, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Pengjun Xie, Ruixue Ding
Abstract
Effectively retrieving, reasoning, and understanding multimodal information remains a critical challenge for agentic systems. Traditional Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) methods rely on linear interaction histories, which struggle to handle longcontext tasks, especially those involving information-sparse yet token-heavy visual data in iterative reasoning scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce VimRAG, a framework tailored for multimodal Retrieval-augmented Reasoning across text, images, and videos. Inspired by our systematic study, we model the reasoning process as a dynamic directed acyclic graph that structures the agent states and retrieved multimodal evidence. Building upon this structured memory, we introduce a Graph-Modulated Visual Memory Encoding mechanism, with which the significance of memory nodes is evaluated via their topological position, allowing the model to dynamically allocate high-resolution tokens to pivotal evidence while compressing or discarding trivial clues. To implement this paradigm, we propose a Graph-Guided Policy Optimization strategy. This strategy disentangles step-wise validity from trajectory-level rewards by pruning memory nodes associated with redundant actions, thereby facilitating fine-grained credit assignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VimRAG consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse multimodal RAG benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/VRAG .
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