<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="chen-etal-2026-efficient-multimodal">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Efficient Multimodal Planning Agent for Visual Question-Answering</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Zhuo</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Chen</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Xinyu</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Geng</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Xinyu</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Yong</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Jiang</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Zhen</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Pengjun</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Xie</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Kewei</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Tu</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-11</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Yue</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Ruifeng</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Xu</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Ayu</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Purwarianti</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Tong</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Rong</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Jun</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Suzuki</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Hengqin, China</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-444-6</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>Visual Question-Answering (VQA) is a challenging multimodal task that requires integrating visual and textual information to generate accurate responses. While multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) has shown promise in enhancing VQA systems by providing more evidence on both image and text sides, the default procedure that addresses VQA queries, especially the knowledge-intensive ones, often relies on multi-stage pipelines of mRAG with inherent dependencies. To mitigate the inefficiency limitations while maintaining VQA task performance, this paper proposes a method that trains a multimodal planning agent, dynamically decomposing the mRAG pipeline to solve the VQA task. Our method optimizes the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness by training the agent to intelligently determine the necessity of each mRAG step. In our experiments, the agent can help reduce redundant computations, cutting search time by over 60% compared to existing methods and decreasing costly tool calls. Meanwhile, experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms all baselines, including a Deep Research agent and a carefully designed prompt-based method, on average over six various datasets. Code is released.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">chen-etal-2026-efficient-multimodal</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.239/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-11</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>4698</start>
            <end>4718</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Efficient Multimodal Planning Agent for Visual Question-Answering
%A Chen, Zhuo
%A Geng, Xinyu
%A Wang, Xinyu
%A Jiang, Yong
%A Zhang, Zhen
%A Xie, Pengjun
%A Tu, Kewei
%Y Zhang, Yue
%Y Xu, Ruifeng
%Y Purwarianti, Ayu
%Y Rong, Tong
%Y Suzuki, Jun
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Hengqin, China
%@ 979-8-89176-444-6
%F chen-etal-2026-efficient-multimodal
%X Visual Question-Answering (VQA) is a challenging multimodal task that requires integrating visual and textual information to generate accurate responses. While multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) has shown promise in enhancing VQA systems by providing more evidence on both image and text sides, the default procedure that addresses VQA queries, especially the knowledge-intensive ones, often relies on multi-stage pipelines of mRAG with inherent dependencies. To mitigate the inefficiency limitations while maintaining VQA task performance, this paper proposes a method that trains a multimodal planning agent, dynamically decomposing the mRAG pipeline to solve the VQA task. Our method optimizes the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness by training the agent to intelligently determine the necessity of each mRAG step. In our experiments, the agent can help reduce redundant computations, cutting search time by over 60% compared to existing methods and decreasing costly tool calls. Meanwhile, experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms all baselines, including a Deep Research agent and a carefully designed prompt-based method, on average over six various datasets. Code is released.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.239/
%P 4698-4718

Markdown (Informal)

[Efficient Multimodal Planning Agent for Visual Question-Answering](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.239/) (Chen et al., Findings 2026)

• Efficient Multimodal Planning Agent for Visual Question-Answering (Chen et al., Findings 2026)

ACL

• Zhuo Chen, Xinyu Geng, Xinyu Wang, Yong Jiang, Zhen Zhang, Pengjun Xie, and Kewei Tu. 2026. Efficient Multimodal Planning Agent for Visual Question-Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026, pages 4698–4718, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.