English

MG$^2$-RAG: Multi-Granularity Graph for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Information Retrieval 2026-04-08 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing systems struggle with complex cross-modal reasoning. Flat vector retrieval often ignores structural dependencies, while current graph-based methods rely on costly ``translation-to-text'' pipelines that discard fine-grained visual information. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{MG2^2-RAG}, a lightweight \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{G}ranularity \textbf{G}raph \textbf{RAG} framework that jointly improves graph construction, modality fusion, and cross-modal retrieval. MG2^2-RAG constructs a hierarchical multimodal knowledge graph by combining lightweight textual parsing with entity-driven visual grounding, enabling textual entities and visual regions to be fused into unified multimodal nodes that preserve atomic evidence. Building on this representation, we introduce a multi-granularity graph retrieval mechanism that aggregates dense similarities and propagates relevance across the graph to support structured multi-hop reasoning. Extensive experiments across four representative multimodal tasks (i.e., retrieval, knowledge-based VQA, reasoning, and classification) demonstrate that MG2^2-RAG consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing graph construction overhead with an average 43.3×\times speedup and 23.9×\times cost reduction compared with advanced graph-based frameworks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.04969,
  title  = {MG$^2$-RAG: Multi-Granularity Graph for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation},
  author = {Sijun Dai and Qiang Huang and Xiaoxing You and Jun Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.04969},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:55:46.207Z