BayesRAG: Probabilistic Mutual Evidence Corroboration for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission4834 Authors

Keywords: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Knowledge Graph, Bayesian inference

Abstract:

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a pivotal paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet current approaches struggle with visually rich documents by treating text and images as isolated retrieval targets. Existing methods relying solely on cosine similarity often fail to capture the semantic reinforcement provided by cross-modal alignment and layout-induced coherence.
To address these limitations, we propose **BayesRAG**, a novel multimodal retrieval framework grounded in Bayesian inference and Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. Unlike traditional approaches that rank candidates strictly by similarity, BayesRAG models the intrinsic consistency of retrieved candidates across modalities as probabilistic evidence to refine retrieval confidence.
Specifically, our method computes the posterior association probability for combinations of multimodal retrieval results, prioritizing text-image pairs that mutually corroborate each other in terms of both semantics and layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BayesRAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on challenging multimodal benchmarks. This study establishes a new paradigm for multimodal retrieval fusion that effectively resolves the isolation of heterogeneous modalities through an evidence fusion mechanism and enhances the robustness of retrieval outcomes. Anonymous code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BayesRAG-4C6B.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Research Area Keywords: Information Retrieval and Text Mining,NLP Applications,Question Answering

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 4834