Purifying Multimodal Retrieval: Fragment-Level Evidence Selection for RAG
Abstract
Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) is widely adopted for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with external evidence to reduce hallucinations. Despite its success, most existing MRAG frameworks treat retrieved evidence as indivisible documents, implicitly assuming that all content within a document is equally informative. In practice, however, sometimes only a small fraction of a document is relevant to a given query, while the remaining content introduces substantial noise that may lead to performance degradation. We address this fundamental limitation by reframing MRAG as a fine-grained evidence selection problem. We propose Fragment-level Evidence Selection for RAG (FES-RAG), a framework that selects atomic multimodal fragments rather than entire documents as grounding evidence. FES-RAG decomposes retrieved multimodal documents into sentence-level textual fragments and region-level visual fragments, enabling precise identification of evidence that directly supports generation. To guide fragment selection, we introduce Fragment Information Gain (FIG), a principled metric that measures the marginal contribution of each fragment to the MLLM's generation confidence. Based on FIG, we distill fragment-level utility judgments from a high-capacity MLLM into a lightweight selector, achieving accurate evidence selection with low inference overhead. Experiments on the M2RAG benchmark show that FES-RAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art document-level MRAG methods, achieving up to 27% relative improvement in CIDEr. By selecting fewer yet more informative fragments, our approach substantially reduces context length while improving factual accuracy and generation coherence.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Navve Wasserman | 73 | 100 DocReRank: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation for Training Multi-Modal RAG Rerankers (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 100 REAL-MM-RAG: A Real-World Multi-Modal Retrieval Benchmark (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 19 Paint by Inpaint: Learning to Add Image Objects by Removing Them First (2025) Generative Models for Recommendation and Content › Others |
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| 2 | Liwei Wang 0009 | 62 | 66 A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding (2019) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 Improving One-Stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Construction (2020) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 Improving Image-Sentence Embeddings Using Large Weakly Annotated Photo Collections (2014) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 3 | Tingyu Song | 46 | 69 Rethinking Composed Image Retrieval Evaluation: A Fine-Grained Benchmark from Image Editing (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 54 LimRank: Less is More for Reasoning-Intensive Information Reranking (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 41 VF-Eval: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs for Generating Feedback on AIGC Videos (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Hongjin Qian | 45 |
Area-chair candidates (4)
| Xiaoye Qu | 47 | 15 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian assigned | 45 | 12 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 44 | 15 papers | |
| Hao Fei 0001 | 39 | 4 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Navve Wasserman assigned | 73 | 3 | 100 DocReRank: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation for Training Multi-Modal RAG Rerankers (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 100 REAL-MM-RAG: A Real-World Multi-Modal Retrieval Benchmark (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 2 | Haokun Wen | 69 | 3 | 67 Personalized Fashion Compatibility Modeling via Metapath-guided Heterogeneous Graph Learning (2022) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 FiRE: Enhancing MLLMs with Fine-Grained Context Learning for Complex Image Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 3 | Liwei Wang 0009 assigned | 62 | 3 | 66 A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding (2019) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 Improving One-Stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Construction (2020) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 4 | Jian Lang | 56 | 3 | 68 REDEEMing Modality Information Loss: Retrieval-Guided Conditional Generation for Severely Modality Missing Learning (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 Echoes in the Feed: Evolution-aware Prompt-augmented Micro-video Popularity Prediction (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 5 | Minghui Fang 0002 | 56 | 3 | 68 Vela: Scalable Embeddings with Voice Large Language Models for Multimodal Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 Multimodal Conditional Retrieval with High Controllability (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 6 | Xinying Qian | 55 | 3 | 66 Hyperbolic Multimodal Generative Representation Learning for Generalized Zero-Shot Multimodal Information Extraction (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 SMIR: Span-based multi-grained information refinement for joint multimodal entity-relation extraction (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 7 | Xuhui Sui | 53 | 3 | 66 Coarse-to-fine multimodal prototype network for few-shot multimodal relation extraction (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 SMIR: Span-based multi-grained information refinement for joint multimodal entity-relation extraction (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 8 | Yanzhao Zhang | 51 | 3 | 68 Bridging Modalities: Improving Universal Multimodal Retrieval by Multimodal Large Language Models (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 68 Breaking the Modality Barrier: Universal Embedding Learning with Multimodal LLMs (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 9 | Junjie Zhou 0001 | 50 | 3 | 66 VISTA: Visualized Text Embedding For Universal Multi-Modal Retrieval (2024) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis for Universal Multimodal Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 10 | Jinpeng Wang 0002 | 50 | 3 | 68 Imagine with Layout and Sketch: Enhancing Vision-Language Retrieval with Dual-Stream Multi-Modal Query Refinement (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 68 Suit the Remedy to the Retriever: Interpretable Query Optimization with Retriever Preference Alignment for Vision-Language Retrieval (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 11 | Di Wu 0054 | 49 | 3 | 87 VisRet: Visualization Improves Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-Image Retrieval (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG 55 LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval |
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| 12 | Linchao Zhu | 47 | 3 | 69 Attention as Selector: Unlocking VLM Attention for Long Document Page Retrieval (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 Knowledge-Enhanced Dual-Stream Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (2024) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 14 | Tingyu Song assigned | 46 | 3 | 69 Rethinking Composed Image Retrieval Evaluation: A Fine-Grained Benchmark from Image Editing (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 54 LimRank: Less is More for Reasoning-Intensive Information Reranking (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 15 | Meiyu Liang | 45 | 3 | 66 Dynamic Self-adaptive Multiscale Distillation from Pre-trained Multimodal Large Model for Efficient Cross-modal Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 66 Knowledge Graph Enhanced Multimodal Transformer for Image-Text Retrieval (2024) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 16 | Weipeng Chen | 45 | 3 | 55 RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 47 HtmlRAG: HTML is Better Than Plain Text for Modeling Retrieved Knowledge in RAG Systems (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 18 | Xingyu Tan 0001 | 44 | 3 | 51 PRoH: Dynamic Planning and Reasoning over Knowledge Hypergraphs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG 47 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
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| 20 | Jinheon Baek | 44 | 3 | 87 UniversalRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Corpora of Diverse Modalities and Granularities (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG 55 Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA |
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| 21 | Jianfeng Dong | 44 | 3 | 65 Feature Re-Learning with Data Augmentation for Content-based Video Recommendation (2018) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 64 Exploring Content-based Video Relevance for Video Click-Through Rate Prediction (2019) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 22 | Xinyu Ma 0001 COI: co-author | 44 | 3 | 47 Direct Retrieval-augmented Optimization: Synergizing Knowledge Selection and Language Models (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 42 Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion |
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| 23 | Jing Liu 0022 | 43 | 3 | 48 Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 47 REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 24 | Huiqiang Jiang | 43 | 3 | 66 Attentive Mask CLIP (2023) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 47 Position Engineering: Boosting Large Language Models through Positional Information Manipulation (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 25 | Sheng-Chieh Lin | 43 | 3 | 69 Unifying Multimodal Retrieval via Document Screenshot Embedding (2024) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 68 Mm-Embed: Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Multimodal LLMS (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 26 | Haiyang Xu 0001 | 42 | 3 | 44 Efficient and Effective In-context Demonstration Selection with Coreset (2026) Multimodal Retrieval and Embedding 44 Vision Language Pre-training by Contrastive Learning with Cross-Modal Similarity Regulation (2023) Multimodal Retrieval and Embedding |
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| 27 | Weiwei Sun 0001 | 42 | 3 | 47 Direct Retrieval-augmented Optimization: Synergizing Knowledge Selection and Language Models (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 40 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 28 | Ruqing Zhang 0001 | 42 | 3 | 55 Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Generation-Augmented Retrieval: A Co-Training Approach (2025) Generative Retrieval 42 CorpusBrain++: A Continual Generative Pre-Training Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks (2026) Generative Retrieval |
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| 29 | Yujia Zhou 0002 COI: co-author | 41 | 3 | 55 Grounding Language Model with Chunking-Free In-Context Retrieval (2024) Generative Retrieval 55 CorpusLM: Towards a Unified Language Model on Corpus for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2024) Generative Retrieval |
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| 30 | Zihao Yue | 41 | 3 | 41 OpenMMEgo: Enhancing Egocentric Understanding for LMMs with Open Weights and Data (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding 41 Movie101v2: Improved Movie Narration Benchmark (2025) Video and Temporal Understanding |
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| 31 | Venktesh V | 41 | 3 | 53 The Surprising Effectiveness of Rankers trained on Expanded Queries (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 52 Reproducing Adaptive Reranking for Reasoning-Intensive IR (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |
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| 32 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 41 | 3 | 67 Multi-view Semantic Contrastive Alignment for Multimodal Recommendation (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 24 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 33 | Kaixin Ma | 41 | 3 | 56 Open Domain Question Answering with A Unified Knowledge Interface (2022) Multimodal and Graph RAG 56 Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement |