SK-VQA: Synthetic Knowledge Generation at Scale for Training Context-Augmented Multimodal LLMs
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Document understanding and multimodal RAG
also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)
Multimodal retrieval augmented generation (RAG) plays a crucial role in domains such as knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA), where external knowledge is needed to answer a question. However, existing multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) are not designed for context-augmented generation, limiting their effectiveness in such tasks. While synthetic data generation has recently gained attention for training MLLMs, its application for context-augmented generation remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce SK-VQA, a large-scale synthetic multimodal dataset containing over 2 million visual question-answer pairs, each associated with context documents containing information necessary to determine the final answer. Compared to previous datasets, SK-VQA contains 11x more unique questions, exhibits greater domain diversity, and covers a broader spectrum of image sources. Through human evaluations, we confirm the high quality of the generated question-answer pairs and their contextual relevance. Extensive experiments show that SK-VQA serves both as a challenging KB-VQA benchmark and as an effective training resource for adapting MLLMs to context-augmented generation. Our results further indicate that models trained on SK-VQA demonstrate enhanced generalization in both context-aware VQA and multimodal RAG settings. SK-VQA is publicly available via Hugging Face Hub.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Document understanding and multimodal RAG, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 49 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2024.
Builds on
49 of 58 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2024Wiki-LLaVA: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multimodal LLMs23 Apr
- 2022REVEAL: Retrieval-Augmented Visual-Language Pre-Training with Multi-Source Multimodal Knowledge Memory10 Dec
- 2022Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Language Modeling22 Nov
Other references · 46
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
- 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
- 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
- 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
- 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
- 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,539
- 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,322
- 2023Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 4,362
- 2022BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generationcited by 4,310
- 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 3,595
34 more
- 2023MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Modelscited by 2,689
- 2023Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 1,696
- 2021LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairscited by 1,544
- 2019OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledgecited by 1,114
- 2022BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedurecited by 779
- 2023In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Modelscited by 694
- 2024A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 352
- 2023The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forgetcited by 343
- 2022Is synthetic data from generative models ready for image recognition?cited by 320
- 2023Analyzing and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 314
- 2020Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrievalcited by 305
- 2022Generate rather than Retrieve: Large Language Models are Strong Context Generatorscited by 296
- 2023Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Modelscited by 295
- 2021WIT: Wikipedia-based Image Text Dataset for Multimodal Multilingual Machine Learningcited by 285
- 2023Effective Data Augmentation With Diffusion Modelscited by 282
- 2022MuRAG: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generator for Open Question Answering over Images and Textcited by 216
- 2023G-LLaVA: Solving Geometric Problem with Multi-Modal Large Language Modelcited by 208
- 2023Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?cited by 203
- 2021Benchmarking Representation Learning for Natural World Image Collectionscited by 167
- 2023UniIR: Training and Benchmarking Universal Multimodal Information Retrieverscited by 165
- 2024Long-form factuality in large language modelscited by 146
- 2024Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Datacited by 143
- 2023Scaling Laws of Synthetic Images for Model Training ... for Nowcited by 107
- 2023Encyclopedic VQA: Visual questions about detailed properties of fine-grained categoriescited by 105
- 2022Tomayto, Tomahto. Beyond Token-level Answer Equivalence for Question Answering Evaluationcited by 66
- 2021Human-Adversarial Visual Question Answeringcited by 57
- 2023SocialCounterfactuals: Probing and Mitigating Intersectional Social Biases in Vision-Language Models with Counterfactual Examplescited by 53
- 2023Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioningcited by 41
- 2023COCO-Counterfactuals: Automatically Constructed Counterfactual Examples for Image-Text Pairscited by 39
- 2023Dataset Interfaces: Diagnosing Model Failures Using Controllable Counterfactual Generationcited by 35
- 2024DesignQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models' Understanding of Engineering Documentationcited by 30
- 2022NeuroCounterfactuals: Beyond Minimal-Edit Counterfactuals for Richer Data Augmentationcited by 23
- 2024SnapNTell: Enhancing Entity-Centric Visual Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Multimodal LLMcited by 18
- 2024Cross-modal Retrieval for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answeringcited by 13
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 6.
12 papers.
- 2025Ask in Any Modality: A Comprehensive Survey on Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 42
- 2025Visual-RAG: Benchmarking Text-to-Image Retrieval Augmented Generation for Visual Knowledge Intensive Queriescited by 16
- 2025Traveling Across Languages: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Consistency in Multimodal LLMscited by 3
- 2025Learning from Reasoning Failures via Synthetic Data Generationcited by 2
- 2026Learning to Search: A Decision-Based Agent for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answeringcited by 2
- 202620/20 Vision Language Models: A Prescription for Better VLMs through Data Curation Alonecited by 2
- 2026Benchmarking Deflection and Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2025Agent-Centric Projection of Prompting Techniques and Implications for Synthetic Training Data for Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2025Augmented Vision-Language Models: A Systematic Reviewcited by 0
- 2026LITTA: Late-Interaction and Test-Time Alignment for Visually-Grounded Multimodal Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026Identifying and Resolving Pitfalls of Knowledge-Based VQA Benchmarks: Auditing, Repairing, and Augmentingcited by 0
- 2026VLD-RAG: Agentic Vision-Language Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long, Visually-Rich Multi-Page Documentscited by 0
- 2026Identifying and Resolving Pitfalls of Knowledge-Based VQA Benchmarks: Auditing, Repairing, and Augmenting30 Jun 2026
- 2026VLD-RAG: Agentic Vision-Language Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long, Visually-Rich Multi-Page Documents21 May 2026
- 202620/20 Vision Language Models: A Prescription for Better VLMs through Data Curation Alone12 May 2026
- 2026Benchmarking Deflection and Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models13 Apr 2026
- 2026Learning to Search: A Decision-Based Agent for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering8 Apr 2026
- 2026LITTA: Late-Interaction and Test-Time Alignment for Visually-Grounded Multimodal Retrieval10 Mar 2026
- 2025Augmented Vision-Language Models: A Systematic Review24 Jul 2025
- 2025Traveling Across Languages: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Consistency in Multimodal LLMs21 May 2025
- 2025Learning from Reasoning Failures via Synthetic Data Generation20 Apr 2025
- 2025Visual-RAG: Benchmarking Text-to-Image Retrieval Augmented Generation for Visual Knowledge Intensive Queries23 Feb 2025
- 2025Ask in Any Modality: A Comprehensive Survey on Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation12 Feb 2025
- 2025Agent-Centric Projection of Prompting Techniques and Implications for Synthetic Training Data for Large Language Models14 Jan 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025mKG-RAG: Leveraging Multimodal Knowledge Graphs in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-intensive VQA
- 2025Fine-Grained Knowledge Structuring and Retrieval for Visual Question Answering
- 2024Enhanced Multimodal RAG-LLM for Accurate Visual Question Answering
- 2024Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation with Dynamic VQA Dataset and Self-adaptive Planning Agent
- 2025ReAG: Reasoning-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
- 2024Towards Flexible Evaluation for Generative Visual Question Answering
- 2024mR2AG: Multimodal Retrieval-Reflection-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Based VQA
- 2024EchoSight: Advancing Visual-Language Models with Wiki Knowledge