Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrieval

Abstract

With the rapid proliferation of multimodal information, Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) has emerged as a critical frontier in bridging the gap between unstructured visually rich data and precise information acquisition. Unlike traditional natural image retrieval, visual documents exhibit unique characteristics defined by dense textual content, intricate layouts, and fine-grained semantic dependencies. This paper surveys the VDR landscape as a retrieval problem in its own right, rather than as the front end of a generation pipeline, and does so specifically through the lens of the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) era. We begin by examining the benchmark landscape, including the recent turn toward reasoning-intensive evaluation, and then dive into the methodological evolution along two orthogonal axes: what a retriever is, spanning multimodal embedding models and reranker models, and how it is deployed, from single-stage retrieval through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to Agentic systems. Cutting across both, we analyse the representation--efficiency trade-off that late interaction imposes. We ground these categories in leaderboard evidence on where the empirical frontier actually lies, and close by identifying persistent challenges and outlining promising future directions for multimodal document intelligence.