VaRS-Doc: Interpretation-Aware Variant Representations via Latent Self-Probing for Visual Document Retrieval

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01211v1
• Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:55:57 GMT
• Title: VaRS-Doc: Interpretation-Aware Variant Representations via Latent Self-Probing for Visual Document Retrieval
• Abstract summary: We propose VaRS-Doc, a visual document retrieval framework that diversifies document representations.<n>VaRS-Doc achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance, offering a practical solution to the mismatch between query-agnostic document encoding and query-specific retrieval needs.
• Score: 40.36520318905935
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Visual document retrieval has recently become increasingly important in applications such as enterprise search, scientific literature discovery, and retrieval-augmented generation. These applications depend on efficiently identifying query-relevant pages across large collections of visually rich documents. Existing methods commonly adopt late-interaction architectures that encode and index documents offline to enable scalable and low-latency online retrieval. Despite its efficiency, this paradigm requires each document to be encoded into a fixed representation before the query is known. However, the same content in a visual document may induce different interpretations depending on the query intent, which a fixed representation struggles to capture. Yet postponing document encoding until the query arrives would incur prohibitive online retrieval latency. To address this gap, we propose VaRS-Doc, a visual document retrieval framework that diversifies document representations by enabling the model to actively explore variant latent interpretations during document encoding, while preserving efficient late-interaction retrieval in which each query adaptively selects the best-fit representation. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy that encourages the model to capture complementary semantic interpretations and prevents it from falling back to train a single dominant representation. Experiments on visual document retrieval benchmarks show that VaRS-Doc achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance, offering a practical solution to the mismatch between query-agnostic document encoding and query-specific retrieval needs. Code is available at https://github.com/bokufa/VaRS-Doc.

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