Existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating whether models can retrieve and utilize external textual knowledge for question answering. However, there are scenarios where retrieving visual information is either more beneficial or easier to access than textual data. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation benchmark, MRAG-Bench, in which we systematically identify and categorize scenarios where visually augmented knowledge is better than textual knowledge, for instance, more images from varying viewpoints. MRAG-Bench consists of 16,130 images and 1,353 human-annotated multiple-choice questions across 9 distinct scenarios. With MRAG-Bench, we conduct an evaluation of 10 open-source and 4 proprietary large vision-language models (LVLMs). Our results show that all LVLMs exhibit greater improvements when augmented with images compared to textual knowledge, confirming that MRAG-Bench is vision-centric. Additionally, we conduct extensive analysis with MRAG-Bench, which offers valuable insights into retrieval-augmented LVLMs. Notably, the top-performing model, GPT-4o, faces challenges in effectively leveraging retrieved knowledge, achieving only a 5.82% improvement with ground-truth information, in contrast to a 33.16% improvement observed in human participants. These findings highlight the importance of MRAG-Bench in encouraging the community to enhance LVLMs' ability to utilize retrieved visual knowledge more effectively.

This article was originally published by The Conversation. Have you ever bitten into a nut or a piece of chocolate expecting a smooth, rich taste only to encounter an unexpected and unpleasant chalky or sour flavor? That taste is rancidity in action, and it affects pretty much every product in your pantry. Now artificial intelligence can help scientists tackle this issue more precisely and efficiently. We're a group of chemists who study ways to extend the life of food products, including those that go rancid.

A combustion chemistry acceleration scheme is developed based on deep operator networks (DeepONets). The scheme is based on the identification of combustion reaction dynamics through a modified DeepOnet architecture such that the solutions of thermochemical scalars are projected to new solutions in small and flexible time increments. The approach is designed to efficiently implement chemistry acceleration without the need for computationally expensive integration of stiff chemistry. An additional framework of latent-space dynamics identification with modified DeepOnet is also proposed which enhances the computational efficiency and widens the applicability of the proposed scheme. The scheme is demonstrated on simple chemical kinetics of hydrogen oxidation to more complex chemical kinetics of n-dodecane high- and low-temperature oxidations. The proposed framework accurately learns the chemical kinetics and efficiently reproduces species and temperature temporal profiles corresponding to each application. In addition, a very large speed-up with a great extrapolation capability is also observed with the proposed scheme.