Knowledge-based Visual Question Answer with Multimodal Processing,
  Retrieval and Filtering
Authors: name: Yuyang Hong; name: Jiaqi Gu; name: Qi Yang; name: Lubin Fan; name: Yue Wu; name: Ying Wang; name: Kun Ding; name: Shiming Xiang; name: Jieping Ye
Published: 2025-10-16 12:10:00

Abstract: Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires visual language
models (VLMs) to integrate visual understanding with external knowledge
retrieval. Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) achieves significant
advances in this task by combining knowledge-base querying, it still struggles
with the quality of multimodal queries and the relevance of retrieved results.
To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel three-stage method, termed
Wiki-PRF, including Processing, Retrieval and Filtering stages. The processing
stage dynamically invokes visual tools to extract precise multimodal
information for retrieval. The retrieval stage integrates visual and text
features to achieve multimodal knowledge retrieval. The filtering stage
performs relevance filtering and concentration on retrieval results. To this
end, we introduce a visual language model trained with answer accuracy and
format consistency as reward signals via a reinforcement learning manner. This
enhances the model's reasoning, tool invocation for accurate queries, and
filtering of irrelevant content. Experiments on benchmark datasets (E-VQA and
InfoSeek) show significant improvements~(36.0 and 42.8) in answer quality,
achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at
https://github.com/cqu-student/Wiki-PRF