arXiv:2609.05518cs.CVcs.AI2026-09

构建首个跨模态多跳推理基准,测试模型从图文混合数据中找证据的能力。

CrossModalQA: A Cross-modal and Multi-hop Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-augmented Generation

论文配图:CrossModalQA: A Cross-modal and Multi-hop Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-augmented Generation
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于维基百科与图库的跨模态知识图谱采样生成数据
  • 平均每题需3.5跳推理,覆盖五类图文联合推理路径
  • 揭示多图像检索是当前模型最大瓶颈,而非生成器规模

尽管多模态大语言模型能力强大,其参数化知识仍不完整且难以更新,促使多模态检索增强生成(RAG)通过外部文本和图像来支撑回答。然而现有基准存在两大局限:一是多集中于单跳检索或有限上下文下的推理,而非开放域证据发现;二是跨模态推理路径覆盖零散,复杂多跳与多图像推理未被充分探索。本文提出CrossModalQA,一个面向异构语料库的开放域多模态检索与推理评估基准。该基准包含1,863个问答对,源自4,987篇维基百科文章和4,431张Wikimedia Commons图片,涵盖五类互补推理路径:视觉到文本、文本到视觉、视觉-文本-视觉、多图像交集及图像集推理。每个问题需检索并整合分散的文本与视觉证据,平均推理深度为3.50跳。通过多模态知识图谱引导的子图采样构建,并采用规则一致性检查与大模型验证确保跨模态依赖性与可追溯证据。大量实验表明,现有多模态RAG系统难以恢复完整的证据链,在不完整检索引入干扰信息时,甚至表现不如闭卷模型。进一步分析显示,完整跨模态检索对答案准确率的提升超过生成器规模扩展,而多图像检索与推理仍是制约端到端性能的主要瓶颈。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Despite the strong capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their parametric knowledge remains incomplete and difficult to update, motivating multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground responses in external text and images. However, existing benchmarks face two major limitations: (i) they typically emphasize single-hop retrieval or reasoning over a small set of provided contexts rather than open-domain evidence discovery; and (ii) they provide fragmented coverage of cross-modal reasoning paths, leaving complex multi-hop and multi-image reasoning underexplored. In this paper, we introduce CrossModalQA, an open-domain benchmark for evaluating multimodal retrieval and reasoning over heterogeneous corpora. CrossModalQA contains 1,863 question-answer pairs constructed from 4,987 Wikipedia articles and 4,431 Wikimedia Commons images. It covers five complementary reasoning paths: vision-to-text, text-to-vision, vision-to-text-to-vision, multi-image intersection, and image-set reasoning. Every question requires retrieving and composing distributed textual and visual evidence, with an average reasoning depth of 3.50 hops. We construct the benchmark through multimodal knowledge graph-guided subgraph sampling and apply rule-based consistency checking and LLM verification to ensure multimodal dependence and traceable evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that existing multimodal RAG systems struggle to recover complete evidence chains and can underperform closed-book models when incomplete retrieval introduces distracting context. Further analysis reveals that complete cross-modal retrieval contributes more to answer accuracy than generator scaling, while multi-image retrieval and reasoning remain the primary bottlenecks limiting end-to-end performance.

多模态推理跨模态RAG知识图谱

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