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HFEPX · Eval paper review

AWM: Answerable Working Memory for Long-Document VQA Agents

Dongzhuoran Zhou, Yuqicheng Zhu, Yule Liu, Zhen Yang +4 more

Published

Aug 26, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

5/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

45% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Aug 26, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
5/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Abstract

Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers. Working memory should carry answer-supporting evidence across page inspections for later grounded answering, yet existing evaluation mainly checks final-answer correctness and evidence-page access. This creates a memory-quality blind spot: an agent may reach the right page and answer correctly while leaving behind memory too generic or incomplete to support answering once page context is removed. We introduce \emph{memory-only answerability}, a diagnostic that asks whether a reader can answer from the question and terminal working memory alone. Building on this diagnostic, \emph{Answerable Working Memory} (AWM) treats terminal working memory as an answerable evidence artifact, and AWM-GRPO incorporates this signal into the GRPO reward while preserving final-answer priority. Under GRPO, this reward assigns higher advantages to answer-correct trajectories whose terminal working memory remains answerable. On \textsc{MMLongBench-Doc}, even when gold evidence pages are provided, 42.5\% of correct answers still cannot be answered from terminal working memory alone. AWM-GRPO improves final-answer accuracy over the RAG baseline by 8.1 and 11.9 points on \textsc{MMLongBench-Doc} and \textsc{LongDocURL} and reduces the memory-missing-correct rate by 2.7 points over answer-only GRPO.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers."

Benchmarks / Datasets

partial

Mmlongbench

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"On \textsc{MMLongBench-Doc}, even when gold evidence pages are provided, 42.5\% of correct answers still cannot be answered from terminal working memory alone."

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"AWM-GRPO improves final-answer accuracy over the RAG baseline by 8.1 and 11.9 points on \textsc{MMLongBench-Doc} and \textsc{LongDocURL} and reduces the memory-missing-correct rate by 2.7 points over answer-only GRPO."

Benchmarks and datasets

Mmlongbench

Reported metrics

accuracy
Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Expertise required
General
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
Automatic Metrics
Agentic eval
None
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers.
  • Working memory should carry answer-supporting evidence across page inspections for later grounded answering, yet existing evaluation mainly checks final-answer correctness and evidence-page access.
  • This creates a memory-quality blind spot: an agent may reach the right page and answer correctly while leaving behind memory too generic or incomplete to support answering once page context is removed.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Contribution summary

  • Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers.
  • Working memory should carry answer-supporting evidence across page inspections for later grounded answering, yet existing evaluation mainly checks final-answer correctness and evidence-page access.
  • We introduce memory-only answerability, a diagnostic that asks whether a reader can answer from the question and terminal working memory alone.

Why it matters for eval

  • Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers.
  • Working memory should carry answer-supporting evidence across page inspections for later grounded answering, yet existing evaluation mainly checks final-answer correctness and evidence-page access.

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Mmlongbench

  • Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy