Yinger Zhang, Shutong Jiang, Renhao Li, Jianhong Tu, Yang Su, Lianghao Deng, Xudong Guo, ChenXu Lv, Junyang Lin. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The visual information-seeking task aims to answer visual questions that require external knowledge, such as “On what date did this building officially open?”. Existing methods using retrieval-augmented generation framework primarily rely on textual knowledge bases to assist multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in answering questions. However, the text-only knowledge can impair information retrieval for the multimodal query of image and question, and also confuse MLLMs in selecting the most relevant information during generation. In this work, we propose a novel framework MuKA which leverages a multimodal knowledge base to address these limitations. Specifically, we construct a multimodal knowledge base by automatically pairing images with text passages in existing datasets. We then design a fine-grained multimodal interaction to effectively retrieve multimodal documents and enrich MLLMs with both retrieved texts and images. MuKA outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 38.7% and 15.9% on the InfoSeek and E-VQA benchmark respectively, demonstrating the importance of multimodal knowledge in enhancing both retrieval and answer generation.