MegaRAG: Multimodal Knowledge Graph-Based Retrieval Augmented Generation

Chi-Hsiang Hsiao, Yi-Cheng Wang, Tzung-Sheng Lin, Yi-Ren Yeh, Chu-song Chen


Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to dynamically access external information, which is powerful for answering questions over previously unseen documents. Nonetheless, they struggle with high-level conceptual understanding and holistic comprehension due to limited context windows, which constrain their ability to perform deep reasoning over long-form, domain-specific content such as full-length books. To solve this problem, knowledge graphs (KGs) have been leveraged to provide entity-centric structure and hierarchical summaries, offering more structured support for reasoning. However, existing KG-based RAG solutions remain restricted to text-only inputs and fail to leverage the complementary insights provided by other modalities such as vision. On the other hand, reasoning from visual documents requires textual, visual, and spatial cues into structured, hierarchical concepts. To address this issue, we introduce a multimodal knowledge graph-based RAG that enables cross-modal reasoning for better content understanding. Our method incorporates visual cues into the construction of knowledge graphs, the retrieval phase, and the answer generation process. Experimental results across both global and fine-grained question answering tasks show that our approach consistently outperforms existing approaches on both textual and multimodal benchmarks.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.2218
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:
48031–48059
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.2218/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chi-Hsiang Hsiao, Yi-Cheng Wang, Tzung-Sheng Lin, Yi-Ren Yeh, and Chu-song Chen. 2026. MegaRAG: Multimodal Knowledge Graph-Based Retrieval Augmented Generation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 48031–48059, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MegaRAG: Multimodal Knowledge Graph-Based Retrieval Augmented Generation (Hsiao et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.2218.pdf
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 2026.acl-long.2218.checklist.pdf