VAT-KG: Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Knowledge Graph Dataset for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract: Multimodal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs), which represent explicit knowledge across multiple modalities, play a pivotal role by complementing the implicit knowledge of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and enabling more grounded reasoning via Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). However, existing MMKGs are generally limited in scope: they are often constructed by augmenting pre-existing knowledge graphs, which restricts their knowledge, resulting in outdated or incomplete knowledge coverage, and they often support only a narrow range of modalities, such as text and visual information. These limitations reduce their extensibility and applicability to a broad range of multimodal tasks, particularly as the field shifts toward richer modalities such as video and audio in recent MLLMs. Therefore, we propose the Visual-Audio-Text Knowledge Graph (VAT-KG), the first concept-centric and knowledge-intensive multimodal knowledge graph that covers visual, audio, and text information, where each triplet is linked to multimodal data and enriched with detailed descriptions of concepts. Specifically, our construction pipeline ensures cross-modal knowledge alignment between multimodal data and fine-grained semantics through a series of stringent filtering and alignment steps, enabling the automatic generation of MMKGs from any multimodal dataset. We further introduce a novel multimodal RAG framework that retrieves detailed concept-level knowledge in response to queries from arbitrary modalities. Experiments on question answering tasks across various modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of VAT-KG in supporting MLLMs, highlighting its practical value in unifying and leveraging multimodal knowledge.