English

BRIT: Bidirectional Retrieval over Unified Image-Text Graph

Computation and Language 2025-09-30 v2

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising technique to enhance the quality and relevance of responses generated by large language models. While recent advancements have mainly focused on improving RAG for text-based queries, RAG on multi-modal documents containing both texts and images has not been fully explored. Especially when fine-tuning does not work. This paper proposes BRIT, a novel multi-modal RAG framework that effectively unifies various text-image connections in the document into a multi-modal graph and retrieves the texts and images as a query-specific sub-graph. By traversing both image-to-text and text-to-image paths in the graph, BRIT retrieve not only directly query-relevant images and texts but also further relevant contents to answering complex cross-modal multi-hop questions. To evaluate the effectiveness of BRIT, we introduce MM-RAG test set specifically designed for multi-modal question answering tasks that require to understand the text-image relations. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of BRIT, highlighting its ability to handle cross-modal questions on the multi-modal documents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.18450,
  title  = {BRIT: Bidirectional Retrieval over Unified Image-Text Graph},
  author = {Ainulla Khan and Yamada Moyuru and Srinidhi Akella},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.18450},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted in EMNLP-2025 Findings

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:35:12.366Z