AWM: Answerable Working Memory for Long-Document VQA Agents

Long Document Visual Question Answering (LongDocVQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to locate, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous document elements distributed across multiple pages. Existing approaches, including end-to-end MLLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and document agents, often lack explicit mechanisms to represent and verify how grounded evidence is progressively composed during reasoning, limiting both answer accuracy and traceability. In this paper, we cast LongDocVQA as an explicit evidence graph reasoning problem rather than implicit answer prediction. To this end, we propose DocTrace, a hierarchical framework that progressively performs evidence localization, structured document parsing, and evidence graph reasoning to enable explicit evidence provenance. To effectively learn these capabilities, we develop a two-stage training framework: joint Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) first initializes evidence localization and graph reasoning abilities, followed by task-specific Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with dedicated rewards to further optimize these capabilities. Extensive experiments on MMLongBench-Doc, LongDocURL, and SlideVQA demonstrate that DocTrace consistently outperforms both existing open-source baselines and proprietary MLLMs. Compared with the Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct backbone, DocTrace achieves absolute improvements of 14.4, 11.3, and 11.7 points on the three benchmarks, respectively. Beyond competitive performance, DocTrace constructs traceable evidence graphs with explicit node-level provenance, enabling transparent and verifiable reasoning for long document understanding.

Existing long-document QA benchmarks rarely combine large-scale human-authored questions with detailed visual evidence annotations, limiting diagnosis of evidence localization and interpretation failures. We present VELD-QA, a large-scale benchmark for Visual Evidence grounding and question answering in Long Documents. It contains 15,000 fully human-authored question-answer pairs across 5,859 real-world PDFs totaling 372,445 pages, balancing chart, table, and complex-layout tasks. Human annotations identify supporting pages and evidence elements and describe cited visual content, enabling separate retrieval and interpretation evaluation. We evaluate nine vision-language models under four evidence settings and seven retrieval-augmented and agentic systems. Our analysis identifies bottlenecks in evidence localization and interpretation. Retrieval-based methods substantially underperform the oracle setting with ground-truth supporting pages; full-document access does not close the gap. Localization alone is insufficient: oracle accuracy peaks at 81.7%, highlighting persistent visual interpretation and reasoning challenges. Enriching inputs with our visual-element annotations narrows the performance gap by 17-24%, demonstrating value beyond evaluation and motivating data enrichment for multimodal document QA. Our code is available at https://github.com/oracle-samples/veld-qa.

Multi-page Document Visual Question Answering requires reasoning over semantics, layouts, and visual elements in long, visually dense documents. Existing OCR-free methods face a trade-off between capacity and precision: end-to-end models scale poorly with document length, while visual retrieval-based pipelines are brittle and passive. We propose Doc-$V^*$, an OCR-free agentic framework that casts multi-page DocVQA as sequential evidence aggregation. Doc-$V^*$ begins with a thumbnail overview, then actively navigates via semantic retrieval and targeted page fetching, and aggregates evidence in a structured working memory for grounded reasoning. Trained by imitation learning from expert trajectories and further optimized with Group Relative Policy Optimization, Doc-$V^*$ balances answer accuracy with evidence-seeking efficiency. Across five benchmarks, Doc-$V^*$ outperforms open-source baselines and approaches proprietary models, improving out-of-domain performance by up to 47.9% over RAG baseline. Other results reveal effective evidence aggregation with selective attention, not increased input pages.