← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.13675 · v1
OpticalRAG: Pixel-Space Compression for Token-Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation
首次提交 2026-11-10 15:24
版本更新 2026-11-10 15:24
雷达观测 2026-11-11 11:04
摘要
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is bottlenecked by the token budget of large language models: feeding long documents into the context window is expensive, while aggressive textual compression discards fine-grained information that is irreversibly lost in a one-dimensional token sequence. We argue that this bottleneck is not fundamental to information density but to the choice of compression \emph{modality}. Modern visual encoders can pack the contents of a rendered text page into roughly a hundred visual tokens with little semantic loss, opening a new compression-fidelity tradeoff that purely textual methods cannot reach. We present \textbf{OpticalRAG}, a framework that renders documents as page images, encodes them with a frozen vision encoder, and distills the retrieved visual tokens into as few as $16$ injected tokens before passing them to the LLM. Two ingredients make this work without expensive cross-modal training: (i) \emph{Encoder-Bridged Retrieval}, which projects text-query states into the visual feature space of the frozen encoder, through a projection shared with the compressor, to retrieve visual tokens from a text query, with no contrastive training; and (ii) \emph{Query-Driven Distillation}, a lightweight cross-attention compressor that condenses the retrieved visual tokens into a small set of query-conditioned prefix tokens. On LongBench-v2, BAMBOO, and LooGLE-v2, OpticalRAG achieves the best compression-aware accuracy (CAP) on all three benchmarks while injecting only $16$ tokens, and improves the closed-book Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct backbone by $5.17$ points on LongBench-v2.Code is available at https://github.com/brighterr/OpticalRAG.
作者备注：Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
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v1 · 2026-11-10 15:24 · 最新观测版本
OpticalRAG: Pixel-Space Compression for Token-Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is bottlenecked by the token budget of large language models: feeding long documents into the context window is expensive, while aggressive textual compression discards fine-grained information that is irreversibly lost in a one-dimensional token sequence. We argue that this bottleneck is not fundamental to information density but to the choice of compression \emph{modality}. Modern visual encoders can pack the contents of a rendered text page into roughly a hundred visual tokens with little semantic loss, opening a new compression-fidelity tradeoff that purely textual methods cannot reach. We present \textbf{OpticalRAG}, a framework that renders documents as page images, encodes them with a frozen vision encoder, and distills the retrieved visual tokens into as few as $16$ injected tokens before passing them to the LLM. Two ingredients make this work without expensive cross-modal training: (i) \emph{Encoder-Bridged Retrieval}, which projects text-query states into the visual feature space of the frozen encoder, through a projection shared with the compressor, to retrieve visual tokens from a text query, with no contrastive training; and (ii) \emph{Query-Driven Distillation}, a lightweight cross-attention compressor that condenses the retrieved visual tokens into a small set of query-conditioned prefix tokens. On LongBench-v2, BAMBOO, and LooGLE-v2, OpticalRAG achieves the best compression-aware accuracy (CAP) on all three benchmarks while injecting only $16$ tokens, and improves the closed-book Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct backbone by $5.17$ points on LongBench-v2.Code is available at https://github.com/brighterr/OpticalRAG.
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