VL-DocIR: A Benchmark for Vision-Based Long Document Retrieval

Vision-based document retrieval has improved rapidly, but current evaluation settings still emphasize short documents and single relevant pages. This leaves an important gap between leaderboard performance and realistic long-document retrieval, where the evidence needed to answer a query may span multiple pages or even multiple documents. We present VL-DocIR, a page-level benchmark for evidence-complete visual long-document retrieval. VL-DocIR is built from 29,641 HTML-born documents rendered into 388,548 page images from Wikipedia, arXiv, PubMed, and SEC proxy statements. It contains 271,760 queries across 23 domains and six evidence structures, covering single-page, within-document multi-page, and cross-document evidence configurations. Evidence annotations are grounded to rendered pages and HTML element identifiers, and queries are filtered with a cleaning pipeline targeting clarity, correctness, closedness, and the absence of explicit layout references. We evaluate leading single-vector and multi-vector visual retrievers together with diagnostic retrieval settings such as document-context scoring, query splitting, reranking, and round-robin ensembles. The strongest evaluated configuration reaches 75.6 nDCGAll@10 and 86.2 RecallAll@10, but source- and evidence-structure breakdowns show that cross-document retrieval remains substantially harder than single-page retrieval, and that document-context scoring is especially helpful for within-document multi-page queries. VL-DocIR exposes these failure modes and provides a more demanding target for visual long-document retrieval.