用可学习的潜在概念提升文档检索精度,兼顾图文与布局信息。
ConceptFormer: Learning Adaptive Latent Concepts for Query-Document Alignment in Visual Document Retrieval

- 引入动态生成的潜概念令牌,连接查询与文档语义
- 在多个基准上相对提升22.1%的检索性能
- 适合需要细粒度视觉理解的文档检索场景
视觉文档检索是多模态检索增强生成的关键组件,旨在从包含文本、版式、图表和视觉结构的文档集合中识别与查询相关的页面。现有方法主要依赖文本描述或局部视觉区域作为证据代理,但这些信号可能忽略复杂视觉结构,或提供不完整、不准确的表征。为此,我们提出ConceptFormer,一种用于视觉文档检索的潜在概念表示学习框架。ConceptFormer将查询相关证据建模为连续的、查询相关的潜概念,显式连接局部视觉证据与语义相关性,无需文本中间表示或原始视觉标注。训练时,ConceptFormer利用强视觉-语言模型动态确定潜概念令牌数量,并将其作为中间表示,弥合查询与文档间的语义鸿沟,从而引导嵌入空间的学习。在多个视觉文档检索基准上的实验表明,ConceptFormer在平均NDCG@10上相对于最强视觉检索基线和最强基于OCR的文本检索基线分别实现16.7%和22.1%的相对提升。进一步分析显示,潜概念能有效连接局部视觉证据与语义相关性,使检索器既能捕捉细粒度文本线索,又能理解复杂的文档级视觉结构,同时保持强检索对齐。代码与数据可在https://github.com/Neuir/ConceptFormer获取。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Visual document retrieval is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, aiming to identify query-relevant pages from document collections where evidence is distributed across text, layout, charts, and visual structures. Recent efforts toward finer-grained supervision primarily rely on textual descriptions or localized visual regions as evidence proxies. However, such supervision signals may either overlook complex visual structures or provide incomplete and inaccurate representations of the underlying evidence. To address these limitations, we propose ConceptFormer, a latent concept representation learning framework for visual document retrieval. ConceptFormer models query-relevant evidence as continuous, query-conditioned latent concepts that explicitly bridge localized visual evidence and semantic relevance, without requiring either textual intermediate representations or direct reliance on raw visual annotations. During training, ConceptFormer employs a strong vision-language model to dynamically determine the number of latent concept tokens and uses these concepts as an intermediate representation to bridge the semantic gap between queries and documents, thereby guiding the learning of the embedding space. Experiments on diverse visual document retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that ConceptFormer achieves 16.7\% and 22.1\% relative improvements in average NDCG@10 over the strongest visual retrieval baseline and the strongest OCR-based text retrieval baseline, respectively. Further analysis reveals that latent concepts effectively connect localized visual evidence with semantic relevance, enabling the retriever to capture both fine-grained textual cues and complex document-level visual structures while preserving strong retrieval alignment. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Neuir/ConceptFormer.
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