{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/multimodal-hypothetical-summary-for-retrieval","title":"Multimodal Hypothetical Summary for Retrieval-based Multi-image Question Answering","arxiv_id":"2412.14880","date":"2024-12-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Peize Li","Qingyi Si","Peng Fu","Zheng Lin","Yan Wang"],"abstract":"Retrieval-based multi-image question answering (QA) task involves retrieving multiple question-related images and synthesizing these images to generate an answer. Conventional \"retrieve-then-answer\" pipelines often suffer from cascading errors because the training objective of QA fails to optimize the retrieval stage. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to effectively introduce and reference retrieved information into the QA. Given the image set to be retrieved, we employ a multimodal large language model (visual perspective) and a large language model (textual perspective) to obtain multimodal hypothetical summary in question-form and description-form. By combining visual and textual perspectives, MHyS captures image content more specifically and replaces real images in retrieval, which eliminates the modality gap by transforming into text-to-text retrieval and helps improve retrieval. To more advantageously introduce retrieval with QA, we employ contrastive learning to align queries (questions) with MHyS. Moreover, we propose a coarse-to-fine strategy for calculating both sentence-level and word-level similarity scores, to further enhance retrieval and filter out irrelevant details. Our approach achieves a 3.7% absolute improvement over state-of-the-art methods on RETVQA and a 14.5% improvement over CLIP. Comprehensive experiments and detailed ablation studies demonstrate the superiority of our method.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14880v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14880v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"multimodal-hypothetical-summary-for-retrieval","repo_url":"https://github.com/peizeli96/MHys","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"large-language-model","task_name":"Large Language Model"},{"task_slug":"multimodal-large-language-model","task_name":"Multimodal Large Language Model"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"text-retrieval","task_name":"Text Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"align","method_name":"ALIGN"},{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"},{"method_slug":"contrastive-learning","method_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}