Jun Yu

Xuan Li, Yining Wang, Haocai Luo et al.

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. Our code is available at https://github.com/TioeAre/BayesRAG.

Yingchaojie Feng, Qiang Huang, Xiaoya Xie et al.

Deep research agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform multi-step reasoning, web exploration, and long-form report generation. However, existing systems remain largely autonomous, assuming fully specified user intent and evaluating only final outputs. In practice, research goals are often underspecified and evolve during exploration, yet current benchmarks neither model dynamic user feedback nor measure interaction costs. To address this gap, we introduce IDRBench, the first Interactive Deep Research Benchmark for systematically evaluating the interactive capabilities of deep research agents. IDRBench formulates deep research as an interactive process where agents may solicit clarification to better align with user intent. It integrates a modular interactive framework, a scalable reference-grounded user simulator, and an interaction-aware evaluation suite that jointly measures alignment gains and interaction overhead. Experiments on seven representative proprietary and open-weight LLMs show that interaction consistently improves research quality and robustness, while revealing substantial differences in interaction efficiency across models. These findings establish interactive capability as a distinct evaluation dimension and position IDRBench as a reusable benchmark for future user-aligned deep research agents.

Haodong Chen, Qiang Huang, Jiaqi Zhao et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially consequential settings, raising concerns about social bias driven by demographic cues. A central challenge in measuring such social bias is attribution under visual confounding: real-world images entangle race and gender with correlated factors such as background and clothing, obscuring attribution. We propose a \textbf{face-only counterfactual evaluation paradigm} that isolates demographic effects while preserving real-image realism. Starting from real photographs, we generate counterfactual variants by editing only facial attributes related to race and gender, keeping all other visual factors fixed. Based on this paradigm, we construct \textbf{FOCUS}, a dataset of 480 scene-matched counterfactual images across six occupations and ten demographic groups, and propose \textbf{REFLECT}, a benchmark comprising three decision-oriented tasks: two-alternative forced choice, multiple-choice socioeconomic inference, and numeric salary recommendation. Experiments on five state-of-the-art VLMs reveal that demographic disparities persist under strict visual control and vary substantially across task formulations. These findings underscore the necessity of controlled, counterfactual audits and highlight task design as a critical factor in evaluating social bias in multimodal models.