用生成器反馈优化多模态检索,让相关文档真正有用
Bridging the Semantic-Utility Gap in Multimodal RAG via Generator-in-the-Loop Alignment

- 用图像-问题生成假文本作为检索查询,跨模态对齐
- 基于生成器正确答案判断文档优劣,自动构建训练信号
- 无需人工标注,适配多种模型,提升视觉问答准确率
视觉语言模型(VLM)结合检索增强生成(RAG)可利用外部证据,但标准检索器和重排序器仅优化语义相似性,而非回答实用性,导致相关文档未必有助于生成正确答案。为此,我们提出两阶段生成器在环对齐框架,在无需人工文档级相关性标注的情况下弥合这一差距。第一阶段,由VLM根据图像-问题对生成假设文本,作为稠密文本搜索的检索查询,以跨越图像到文本的模态鸿沟。第二阶段,采用低秩适配(LoRA)微调交叉编码器重排序器,利用冻结的VLM挖掘答案监督偏好对:给定数据集答案标签,若VLM在引入某候选文档后能生成正确答案,则标记为正样本,否则为负样本。该生成器引导的信号兼容对比(三元组)损失、成对直接偏好优化(DPO)和监督微调(SFT),并支持周期性重挖掘以更新偏好对。在VQA-X与A-OKVQA数据集上,使用Qwen3.5-2B与Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct进行实验,结果表明,本框架在不同对齐损失与池大小设置下均优于排序顺序、随机及REPLUG风格似然基线,证明答案级生成器反馈是有效的偏好对齐监督信号。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision-language models (VLMs) augmented with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) benefit from access to external evidence. However, standard retrievers and rerankers optimize for semantic similarity rather than answer utility, creating a preference gap: documents that appear relevant may not help the generator produce a correct answer. Motivated by this, we propose a two-stage generator-in-the-loop alignment framework that closes this gap without human document-level relevance annotations. Our framework consists of two stages: in Stage 1, a VLM generates a hypothetical text passage from the image-query pair, which is used as the retrieval query for dense text search, bridging the image-to-text modality gap. In Stage 2, a cross-encoder reranker adapted with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is fine-tuned using answer-supervised preference pairs mined from the frozen VLM: given the dataset answer label, a candidate document is labeled positive if the VLM produces the correct answer when given that document as context, and negative otherwise. This generator-guided signal is compatible with multiple alignment loss functions, including contrastive (triplet) loss, pairwise direct preference optimization (DPO), and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and supports periodic re-mining to refresh preference pairs as the reranker improves. Experiments on VQA-X and A-OKVQA with Qwen3.5-2B and Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct show that our proposed framework consistently outperforms rank-order, random, and REPLUG-style likelihood baselines under various alignment losses and pool size settings, suggesting that answer-level generator feedback is an effective supervision signal for preference alignment.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。