This paper introduces AuraDial, a large-scale, human-centric dialogue dataset for Chinese AI psychological counseling, comprising over 300,000 single-turn dialogues and 90,000 multi-turn dialogue sessions. A key distinction of AuraDial is its instruction set, primarily derived from real-world user queries, better reflecting genuine expression patterns compared to synthetic or template-based alternatives. Furthermore, we propose an innovative rephrasing-based data generation methodology designed to foster more human-like and empathetic responses, addressing a common shortcoming in AI-generated dialogue. Experimental results demonstrate that models fine-tuned on AuraDial significantly outperform those trained on other public datasets in generating empathetic and relevant replies. AuraDial offers a novel, valuable resource to the Chinese NLP community for advancing AI in psychological counseling. The dataset is publicly available at [https://huggingface.co/datasets/Mxode/AuraDial](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Mxode/AuraDial).

Visually rich documents (VRDs) challenge retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with layout-dependent semantics, brittle OCR, and evidence spread across complex figures and structured tables. This survey examines how Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are being used to make VRD retrieval practical for RAG. We organize the literature into three roles: *Modality-Unifying Captioners*, *Multimodal Embedders*, and *End-to-End Representers*. We compare these roles along retrieval granularity, information fidelity, latency and index size, and compatibility with reranking and grounding. We also outline key trade-offs and offer some practical guidance on when to favor each role.Finally, we identify promising directions for future research, including adaptive retrieval units, model size reduction, and the development of evaluation methods.