# When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00344/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Document understanding and multimodal RAG, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 44 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Document understanding and multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/document-understanding-and-multimodal-rag/)
- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (2023)
- [Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14739/) (2023)
- [Massive Activations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17762/) (2024)
- [Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11713/) (2023)
- [Paying More Attention to Image: A Training-Free Method for Alleviating Hallucination in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21771/) (2024)
- [See What You Are Told: Visual Attention Sink in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03321/) (2025)
- [Encyclopedic VQA: Visual questions about detailed properties of fine-grained categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09224/) (2023)
- [Why Is Spatial Reasoning Hard for VLMs? An Attention Mechanism Perspective on Focus Areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01773/) (2025)
- [Retrieval Augmented Visual Question Answering with Outside Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03809/) (2022)
- [Wiki-LLaVA: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15406/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models with Assembly of Global and Local Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12718/) (2024)
- [VRAG-RL: Empower Vision-Perception-Based RAG for Visually Rich Information Understanding via Iterative Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22019/) (2025)
- [EchoSight: Advancing Visual-Language Models with Wiki Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12735/) (2024)
- [Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07176/) (2024)
- [Look-Back: Implicit Visual Re-focusing in MLLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03019/) (2025)
- [Ground-R1: Incentivizing Grounded Visual Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20272/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The Cost of Context: Mitigating Textual Bias in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05594/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens. In this work, we identify a distinct failure mode that previous study overlooked: Attention Distraction (AD). When the retrieved context is sufficient (highly relevant or including the correct answer), the retrieved text suppresses the visual attention globally, and the attention on image tokens shifts away from question-relevant regions. This leads to failures on questions the model could originally answer correctly without the retrieved text. To mitigate this issue, we propose MAD-RAG, a training-free intervention that decouples visual grounding from context integration through a dual-question formulation, combined with attention mixing to preserve image-conditioned evidence. Extensive experiments on OK-VQA, E-VQA, and InfoSeek demonstrate that MAD-RAG consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model families, yielding absolute gains of up to 4.76%, 9.20%, and 6.18% over the vanilla RAG baseline. Notably, MAD-RAG rectifies up to 74.68% of failure cases with negligible computational overhead.