Less Is More: Graph-free Multimodal RAG via Multi-signal Late Fusion

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.19417v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely used for multimodal, cross-document question answering. However, building corpus-level graphs is expensive, slow to query, and difficult to maintain. We present TrioRAG, a graph-free multimodal framework that integrates evidence from three complementary signals: the question, the anchor image, and a VLM-enhanced query generated from both. Each signal retrieves independently over a shared mu