# RAR: Retrieving And Ranking Augmented MLLMs for Visual Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13805 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13805/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [PyramidDrop: Accelerating Your Large Vision-Language Models via Pyramid Visual Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17247/) (2024)
- [InternLM-XComposer-2.5: A Versatile Large Vision Language Model Supporting Long-Contextual Input and Output](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03320/) (2024)
- [InternLM-XComposer2-4KHD: A Pioneering Large Vision-Language Model Handling Resolutions from 336 Pixels to 4K HD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06512/) (2024)
- [MMDU: A Multi-Turn Multi-Image Dialog Understanding Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset for LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11833/) (2024)
- [InternLM-XComposer2.5-OmniLive: A Comprehensive Multimodal System for Long-term Streaming Video and Audio Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09596/) (2024)
- [DeepMMSearch-R1: Empowering Multimodal LLMs in Multimodal Web Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12801/) (2025)
- [GSCo: Towards Generalizable AI in Medicine via Generalist-Specialist Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15127/) (2024)
- [Retrieval Augmented Generation and Understanding in Vision: A Survey and New Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18016/) (2025)
- [When Machine Unlearning Meets Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Keep Secret or Forget Knowledge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15267/) (2024)
- [Can Multimodal Large Language Models be Guided to Improve Industrial Anomaly Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15795/) (2025)
- [Unified Generative and Discriminative Training for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00304/) (2024)
- [SPARK: Synergistic Policy And Reward Co-Evolving Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22624/) (2025)
- [RAG-Adapter: A Plug-and-Play RAG-enhanced Framework for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08576/) (2025)
- [AnomalyLMM: Bridging Generative Knowledge and Discriminative Retrieval for Text-Based Person Anomaly Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04376/) (2025)
- [SARE: Sample-wise Adaptive Reasoning for Training-free Fine-grained Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17729/) (2026)
- [Efficient Vocabulary-Free Fine-Grained Visual Recognition in the Age of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01064/) (2025)
- [V3Det Challenge 2024 on Vast Vocabulary and Open Vocabulary Object Detection: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11739/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Behavioral Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models for Sequential Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07184/) (2025)
- [Augmented Vision-Language Models: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22933/) (2025)
- [Large Multimodal Models as General In-Context Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23229/) (2026)
- [Visual Species Recognition with Large Multimodal Models as Post-Hoc Correctors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15748/) (2025)
- [Hidden in the Metadata: Stealth Poisoning Attacks on Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00172/) (2026)
- [Focus Where It Counts: A Salience-Driven Vision-Language Model for Low Vision Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28218/) (2026)
- [ProtoRAG: Prototype-Based Retrieval Augmentation for Few-Shot Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05953/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) uses contrastive learning from noise image-text pairs to excel at recognizing a wide array of candidates, yet its focus on broad associations hinders the precision in distinguishing subtle differences among fine-grained items. Conversely, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at classifying fine-grained categories, thanks to their substantial knowledge from pre-training on web-level corpora. However, the performance of MLLMs declines with an increase in category numbers, primarily due to growing complexity and constraints of limited context window size. To synergize the strengths of both approaches and enhance the few-shot/zero-shot recognition abilities for datasets characterized by extensive and fine-grained vocabularies, this paper introduces RAR, a Retrieving And Ranking augmented method for MLLMs. We initially establish a multi-modal retriever based on CLIP to create and store explicit memory for different categories beyond the immediate context window. During inference, RAR retrieves the top-k similar results from the memory and uses MLLMs to rank and make the final predictions. Our proposed approach not only addresses the inherent limitations in fine-grained recognition but also preserves the model's comprehensive knowledge base, significantly boosting accuracy across a range of vision-language recognition tasks. Notably, our approach demonstrates a significant improvement in performance on 5 fine-grained visual recognition benchmarks, 11 few-shot image recognition datasets, and the 2 object detection datasets under the zero-shot recognition setting.