arXiv:2602.00344cs.CVcs.AI2026-02被引 1

检索增强模型会因文本干扰视觉注意力,导致本可答对的问题出错。

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

  • 用双问题设计分离视觉与文本信息,防止检索内容压制图像注意力
  • 在多个数据集上提升性能,最高增益达9.20%,修复74.68%的错误案例
  • 无需训练,计算开销极低,适合实际部署的视觉问答系统

尽管检索增强生成(RAG)是提升大视觉语言模型(LVLMs)在基于知识的视觉问答任务中的主流方法,但现有研究将失败归因于对检索内容关注不足,主张减少图像标记的注意力。本文揭示了一种被忽视的新型失效模式:注意力分散(AD)。当检索内容充分时(高度相关或包含正确答案),检索文本会全局抑制视觉注意力,使图像标记的关注区域偏离与问题相关部分,导致原本可正确回答的问题出现错误。为解决此问题,我们提出MAD-RAG,一种无需训练的干预方法,通过双问题形式解耦视觉定位与上下文整合,并结合注意力混合以保留图像条件证据。在OK-VQA、E-VQA和InfoSeek上的大量实验表明,MAD-RAG在不同模型族中均优于现有基线,相比原始RAG分别获得最高4.76%、9.20%和6.18%的绝对提升。值得注意的是,MAD-RAG可修复高达74.68%的失败案例,且计算开销极小。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens. In this work, we identify a distinct failure mode that previous study overlooked: Attention Distraction (AD). When the retrieved context is sufficient (highly relevant or including the correct answer), the retrieved text suppresses the visual attention globally, and the attention on image tokens shifts away from question-relevant regions. This leads to failures on questions the model could originally answer correctly without the retrieved text. To mitigate this issue, we propose MAD-RAG, a training-free intervention that decouples visual grounding from context integration through a dual-question formulation, combined with attention mixing to preserve image-conditioned evidence. Extensive experiments on OK-VQA, E-VQA, and InfoSeek demonstrate that MAD-RAG consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model families, yielding absolute gains of up to 4.76%, 9.20%, and 6.18% over the vanilla RAG baseline. Notably, MAD-RAG rectifies up to 74.68% of failure cases with negligible computational overhead.

视觉问答检索增强注意力机制模型优化

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