KG-ViP: Bridging Knowledge Grounding and Visual Perception in Multi-modal LLMs for Visual Question Answering

Zhiyang Li, Ao Ke, Yukun Cao, Xike Xie


Abstract
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Visual Question Answering (VQA) often suffer from dual limitations: knowledge hallucination and insufficient fine-grained visual perception. Crucially, we identify that commonsense graphs and scene graphs provide precisely complementary solutions to these respective deficiencies by providing rich external knowledge and capturing fine-grained visual details. However, prior works typically treat them in isolation, overlooking their synergistic potential. To bridge this gap, we propose KG-ViP, a unified framework that empowers MLLMs by fusing scene graphs and commonsense graphs. The core of the KG-ViP framework is a novel retrieval-and-fusion pipeline that utilizes the query as a semantic bridge to progressively integrate both graphs, synthesizing a unified structured context that facilitates reliable multi-modal reasoning. Extensive experiments on FVQA 2.0+ and MVQA benchmarks demonstrate that KG-ViP significantly outperforms existing VQA methods.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1622
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
35144–35157
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1622/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiyang Li, Ao Ke, Yukun Cao, and Xike Xie. 2026. KG-ViP: Bridging Knowledge Grounding and Visual Perception in Multi-modal LLMs for Visual Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 35144–35157, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
KG-ViP: Bridging Knowledge Grounding and Visual Perception in Multi-modal LLMs for Visual Question Answering (Li et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1622.pdf
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