SV-RAG: LoRA-Contextualizing Adaptation of MLLMs for Long Document Understanding

Abstract: Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have recently shown great progress in text-rich image understanding, yet they still struggle with complex, multi-page visually-rich documents. Traditional methods using document parsers for retrieval-augmented generation suffer from performance and efficiency limitations, while directly presenting all pages to MLLMs leads to inefficiencies, especially with lengthy ones. In this work, we present a novel framework named Self-Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SV-RAG), which can broaden horizons of any MLLM to support long-document understanding. We demonstrate that MLLMs themselves can be an effective multimodal retriever to fetch relevant pages and then answer user questions based on these pages. SV-RAG is implemented with two specific MLLM adapters, one for evidence page retrieval and the other for question answering. Empirical results show state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of SV-RAG.