arXiv:2604.22678cs.CL2026-04

用概率方法重排检索文档,让模型更准地回答视觉问题。

BERAG: Bayesian Ensemble Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

论文配图:BERAG: Bayesian Ensemble Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 不拼接文档,而是逐个评估每篇文档的贡献概率
  • 在视觉问答任务中显著提升准确率,尤其在长文档列表下表现更好
  • 适合需要精准溯源的复杂多模态问答场景

检索增强生成(RAG)通常将多个文档拼接成单一上下文输入语言模型,但这种做法会模糊单个文档的贡献,导致信息丢失,并引发‘中间信息遗忘’问题。同时,上下文长度增加会使计算成本呈平方增长,尤其在包含视觉数据的视觉问答中更为严重。限制上下文长度虽能缓解计算压力,却牺牲了深层检索带来的召回优势。为此,本文提出贝叶斯集成检索增强生成(BERAG)与贝叶斯集成微调(BEFT),让语言模型基于独立检索文档进行推理,而非合并后的上下文。BERAG利用贝叶斯规则在生成过程中动态更新文档后验概率作为集成权重,实现概率化重排、并行记忆使用和清晰的文档贡献归因,适用于大规模文档集合。实验表明,该方法在知识型视觉问答任务中优于标准RAG,尤其在Document VQA和多模态‘针堆找针’基准上取得显著提升。此外,文档后验概率可用于检测支撑不足的情况并触发修正,文档剪枝还能加快解码速度。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

A common approach to question answering with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is to concatenate documents into a single context and pass it to a language model to generate an answer. While simple, this strategy can obscure the contribution of individual documents, making attribution difficult and contributing to the ``lost-in-the-middle'' effect, where relevant information in long contexts is overlooked. Concatenation also scales poorly: computational cost grows quadratically with context length, a problem that becomes especially severe when the context includes visual data, as in visual question answering. Attempts to mitigate these issues by limiting context length can further restrict performance by preventing models from benefiting from the improved recall offered by deeper retrieval. We propose Bayesian Ensemble Retrieval-Augmented Generation (BERAG), along with Bayesian Ensemble Fine-Tuning (BEFT), as a RAG framework in which language models are conditioned on individual retrieved documents rather than a single combined context. BERAG treats document posterior probabilities as ensemble weights and updates them token by token using Bayes' rule during generation. This approach enables probabilistic re-ranking, parallel memory usage, and clear attribution of document contribution, making it well-suited for large document collections. We evaluate BERAG and BEFT primarily on knowledge-based visual question answering tasks, where models must reason over long, imperfect retrieval lists. The results show substantial improvements over standard RAG, including strong gains on Document Visual Question Answering and multimodal needle-in-a-haystack benchmarks. We also demonstrate that BERAG mitigates the ``lost-in-the-middle'' effect. The document posterior can be used to detect insufficient grounding and trigger deflection, while document pruning enables faster decoding than standard RAG.

视觉问答检索增强贝叶斯方法

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