@inproceedings{li-liu-2026-fastv,
    title = "{F}ast{V}-{RAG}: Towards Fast and Fine-Grained Video {QA} with Retrieval-Augmented Generation",
    author = "Li, Gen  and
      Liu, Peiyu",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.38/",
    pages = "879--889",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Vision{--}Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual reasoning but still struggle with external knowledge integration. Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) is a promising solution, but current methods remain inefficient and often fail to maintain high answer quality. To address these challenges, we propose VideoSpeculateRAG, an efficient VLM-based RAG framework built on two key ideas. First, we introduce a speculative decoding pipeline: a lightweight draft model quickly generates multiple answer candidates, which are then verified and refined by a more accurate heavyweight model, substantially reducing inference latency without sacrificing correctness. Second, we identify a major source of error, incorrect entity recognition in retrieved knowledge, and mitigate it with a simple yet effective similarity-based filtering strategy that improves entity alignment and boosts overall answer accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that VideoSpeculateRAG achieves comparable or higher accuracy than standard RAG approaches, while speeding up the inference by approximately 2x. Our framework highlights the potential of combining speculative decoding with retrieval-augmented reasoning to enhance efficiency and reliability in complex, knowledge-intensive multimodal tasks."
}