DeCoRAG: Cognitive Decoupling and Semantic-Aware Cropping for Complex Document Understanding

Advancing multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for complex document understanding presents a formidable dual dilemma of accuracy and efficiency, particularly in graph RAG. Processing structurally sparse yet visually dense layouts, such as extracting a tiny data marker from a financial chart, often incurs computationally prohibitive token overhead while still triggering catastrophic hallucination. However, multimodal Graph RAG pipelines rely on graph-construction stages that assume Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can resolve sparse semantics within high-density layouts. We challenge this assumption, revealing that forcing VLMs to localize visual evidence, interpret semantics, and extract relations triggers a "Visual Attention Sink," a mechanism driving catastrophic semantic loss, while full-page processing incurs massive computational overhead. Controlled interventions verify that this failure is boundary-driven rather than content-specific and that semantic anchoring mitigates it. To fundamentally correct this flawed paradigm, we introduce DeCoRAG, a multimodal Graph RAG pipeline that shifts knowledge processing from coupled visual-semantic reasoning to "Cognitive Decoupling." Rather than passively processing raw pixels, its graph-construction stage establishes a macroscopic Semantic Anchor to neutralize the attention sink. This anchor subsequently drives our Region-Aware Pruning and Cropping (RAP-Crop) mechanism, shifting the reasoning space from dense, noisy backgrounds to purified, intent-driven semantic clusters. The resulting graph supports hybrid retrieval and answer generation. Across complex document benchmarks, DeCoRAG improves the semantic pass rate by up to 12.5 percentage points over the strongest baseline and generalizes to DocVQA. RAP-Crop reduces offline graph-construction prompt tokens by 40.8% without sacrificing end-to-end accuracy.