CFVBench: A Comprehensive Video Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to generate responses with external multimodal evidence. Recently, numerous video-based MRAG benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate model capabilities across retrieval and generation stages in MRAG. However, existing benchmarks remain limited in modality coverage and format diversity, often focusing on single- or limited-modality tasks, or coarse-grained scene understanding. To address these gaps, we introduce CFVBench, a large-scale, manually verified benchmark constructed from 599 publicly available videos, yielding 5,360 open-ended QA pairs. CFVBench, spans high-density formats and domains such as chart-heavy reports, news broadcasts, and software tutorials, requiring models to retrieve and reason over long temporal video spans while maintaining fine-grained multimodal information. Using CFVBench, we systematically evaluate 7 retrieval methods and 14 widely-used MLLMs, revealing a critical bottleneck: current models (even GPT5 or Gemini) struggle to capture transient yet essential fine-grained multimodal details. To mitigate this, we propose Adaptive Visual Refinement (AVR), a plug-and-paly framework that adaptively increases frame sampling density and selectively invokes external tools when necessary. Experiments show that AVR consistently enhances fine-grained multimodal comprehension and improves performance across all evaluated MLLMs.