MARDoc: A Memory-Aware Refinement Agent Framework for Multimodal Long Document QA

Iterative retrieval-reasoning agents have recently shown promise for multimodal long-document question answering. However, most existing systems maintain a single growing context that mixes retrieval traces, observations, and intermediate reasoning.

As interactions accumulate, key evidence becomes scattered and diluted, making multi-hop reasoning noisy. We propose MARDoc, a Memory-Aware Refinement Agent framework that decouples long-document QA into three specialized agents: an Explorer for multi-granularity multimodal retrieval, a Refiner for distilling interaction traces into structured evidence and reasoning memories, and a Reflector for checking evidence sufficiency and providing targeted feedback.

Across iterations, the agents rely on a dynamically updated structured memory rather than a full accumulated interaction history. This design reduces context noise while preserving answer-critical facts and their logical dependencies.

Experiments on MMLongBench-Doc and DocBench show that MARDoc achieves strong results, outperforming same-backbone baselines and demonstrating the effectiveness of structured memory for agentic document QA.