Multimodal question answering remains sensitive to noisy, incomplete, and weakly grounded evidence. Long unstructured contexts can introduce redundancy and encourage unsupported generation, while flat retrieval may overlook relations needed for multi-step reasoning. We present HANIA, a planner-guided multimodal graph framework for evidence-grounded question answering. HANIA processes the supplied image and text using a frozen vision-language model to extract concise question-relevant visual evidence with explicit abstention. It then constructs an input-grounded multimodal graph and applies a two-group finite-state planner to coordinate descriptive and relational evidence. Coverage-aware pruning retains a compact evidence set based on relevance, graph confidence, concept coverage, and modality diversity. The selected passages, visual statements, and graph triples are provided to a frozen instruction-tuned decoder. We evaluate HANIA on ScienceQA using answer accuracy, evidence-filtering quality, evidence-budget sensitivity, and efficiency. The results show that structured evidence planning and compact graph-guided retrieval can support competitive multimodal question answering without target-dataset fine-tuning or iterative retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/Zafar-southeast/HANIA.
Zafar Ali, Asad Khan, Nimbeshaho Thierry et al.· 0 citations
Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems often rely on long unstructured contexts or aggressively expanded evidence graphs, which can introduce noisy evidence, weaken multi-hop reasoning, and increase unsupported generation. We present GraphLoom, a reliability-calibrated multimodal knowledge-graph RAG framework for compact and faithful evidence routing. Given a question and its associated multimodal input, GraphLoom constructs an instance-level multimodal knowledge graph from grounded scene descriptions, extracted relational triples, and external commonsense knowledge. Instead of injecting all retrieved evidence into the generator, GraphLoom performs reliability-aware subgraph retrieval with bounded expansion and selectively routes high-utility evidence through hierarchical graph memory slots and joint graph-sequence attention in a frozen language model. To improve robustness in complex reasoning settings, GraphLoom further combines interleaved retrieval with budgeted corrective retrieval, enabling adaptive multi-hop evidence refinement under noisy retrieval conditions. We evaluate GraphLoom on ScienceQA, MultiModalQA, and OK-VQA, including large distractor evidence pools that approximate noisy external knowledge retrieval. Experimental results show consistent gains in answer quality and evidence faithfulness over strong multimodal RAG, graph-retrieval, and open-source vision-language baselines, with improved retrieval quality on MultiModalQA and stable performance under noisy evidence pools. Additional analyses using MiniCheck-based verification, human evaluation, and latency profiling show that reliability-calibrated graph evidence routing provides an effective alternative to long-context multimodal evidence injection.
Zafar Ali, Asad Khan, Aalia Malik et al.· 0 citations
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