VLD-RAG: Agentic Vision-Language Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long, Visually-Rich Multi-Page Documents

Abstract

Visually-rich documents such as reports, slides, and manuals often distribute the evidence needed to answer a question across multiple pages, mixing text with layout cues, tables, charts, and figures. This work studies multimodal retrieval-augmented generation for question answering over such visually-rich long documents, where retrieval must select evidence pages that include both textual and visual signals. We present VLD-RAG, an agentic multimodal RAG framework for multi-page evidence retrieval and cross-page reasoning over long documents. VLD-RAG builds a page-preserving multimodal index that stores parsed text, page-level metadata, and dense visual representations, and uses a hybrid retrieval strategy that combines keyword-based sparse search with dense semantic queries to identify candidate sources and evidence pages. A verifier-guided agent workflow coordinates a Retrieval Agent, Answer Agent, and Validation Agent to broaden evidence coverage, detect missing citations, and refine retrieval requests when needed. We evaluate retrieval with Top-1 and Top-5 evidence-page accuracy and generation with generalized accuracy, and show that VLD-RAG improves both evidence-page retrieval and end-task question answering on visually-rich long-document benchmarks, including LongDocURL and MMLongBench-Doc, outperforming previous vision-based retrieval baselines. These findings highlight that coordinated agent verification and multimodal hybrid retrieval are crucial for reliable grounding when correct answers depend on evidence scattered across pages.