@inproceedings{wei-etal-2026-mode,
    title = "{MODE}-{RAG}: Manifold Outlier Diagnosis and Energy-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation",
    author = "Wei, Zehang  and
      Dai, JiaXin  and
      Yan, Jiamin  and
      Xiang, Xiang",
    editor = "Murray, Kenton  and
      Kriz, Reno",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multimodal Augmented Generation via Multimodal Retrieval ({MAGM}a{R} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.magmar-main.6/",
    pages = "11--26",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-425-5",
    abstract = "While Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M-RAG) enhances Large Vision-Language Models, it remains highly susceptible to cross-modal hallucinations, causal fabrications, and sycophancy. Furthermore, existing mitigation pipelines often face an intervention paradox: static rules tend to unnecessarily disrupt accurate generations, whereas leaving the multi-modal reasoning completely unguided allows existing mismatches to cascade into severe logical fabrications. To quantify and mitigate these hallucinations, we propose a Multi-Agent system, MODE-RAG, driven by Variational Free Energy (VFE) and internal attention states to dynamically gate interventions. High-risk queries are routed to five stage-specific agents, integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for rigorous causal derivation and logit perturbations to penalize sycophancy. Dedicated Correction and Overseer agents ensure formatting stability and perform post-hoc factual verification. To objectively evaluate our approach, we introduce ModeVent, a challenging subset derived from the MultiVent dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that our system effectively reduces hallucination rates and logical fabrication, significantly improving the robustness of M-RAG systems."
}