2024/01/16 by Xinwei Long, Jiali Zeng, Long, Xinwei +11 · 5 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Natural Language Processing Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2401.08206
openalex publication_date 2024/01/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Knowledge retrieval with multi-modal queries plays a crucial role in supporting knowledge-intensive multi-modal applications. However, existing methods face challenges in terms of their effectiveness and training efficiency, especially when it comes to training and integrating multiple retrievers to handle multi-modal queries. In this paper, we propose an innovative end-to-end generative framework for multi-modal knowledge retrieval. Our framework takes advantage of the fact that large language models (LLMs) can effectively serve as virtual knowledge bases, even when trained with limited data. We retrieve knowledge via a two-step process: 1) generating knowledge clues related to the queries, and 2) obtaining the relevant document by searching databases using the knowledge clue. In particular, we first introduce an object-aware prefix-tuning technique to guide multi-grained visual learning. Then, we align multi-grained visual features into the textual feature space of the LLM, employing the LLM to capture cross-modal interactions. Subsequently, we construct instruction data with a unified format for model training. Finally, we propose the knowledge-guided generation strategy to impose prior constraints in the decoding steps, thereby promoting the generation of distinctive knowledge clues. Through experiments conducted on three benchmarks, we demonstrate significant improvements ranging from 3.0% to 14.6% across all evaluation metrics when compared to strong baselines.