VisDoM: Multi-Document QA with Visually Rich Elements Using Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Suri, Manan, Mathur, Puneet, Dernoncourt, Franck, Goswami, Kanika, Rossi, Ryan A., Manocha, Dinesh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Suri, Manan
Mathur, Puneet
Dernoncourt, Franck
Goswami, Kanika
Rossi, Ryan A.
Manocha, Dinesh
author_facet Suri, Manan
Mathur, Puneet
Dernoncourt, Franck
Goswami, Kanika
Rossi, Ryan A.
Manocha, Dinesh
contents Understanding information from a collection of multiple documents, particularly those with visually rich elements, is important for document-grounded question answering. This paper introduces VisDoMBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate QA systems in multi-document settings with rich multimodal content, including tables, charts, and presentation slides. We propose VisDoMRAG, a novel multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that simultaneously utilizes visual and textual RAG, combining robust visual retrieval capabilities with sophisticated linguistic reasoning. VisDoMRAG employs a multi-step reasoning process encompassing evidence curation and chain-of-thought reasoning for concurrent textual and visual RAG pipelines. A key novelty of VisDoMRAG is its consistency-constrained modality fusion mechanism, which aligns the reasoning processes across modalities at inference time to produce a coherent final answer. This leads to enhanced accuracy in scenarios where critical information is distributed across modalities and improved answer verifiability through implicit context attribution. Through extensive experiments involving open-source and proprietary large language models, we benchmark state-of-the-art document QA methods on VisDoMBench. Extensive results show that VisDoMRAG outperforms unimodal and long-context LLM baselines for end-to-end multimodal document QA by 12-20%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_10704
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VisDoM: Multi-Document QA with Visually Rich Elements Using Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Suri, Manan
Mathur, Puneet
Dernoncourt, Franck
Goswami, Kanika
Rossi, Ryan A.
Manocha, Dinesh
Computation and Language
Understanding information from a collection of multiple documents, particularly those with visually rich elements, is important for document-grounded question answering. This paper introduces VisDoMBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate QA systems in multi-document settings with rich multimodal content, including tables, charts, and presentation slides. We propose VisDoMRAG, a novel multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that simultaneously utilizes visual and textual RAG, combining robust visual retrieval capabilities with sophisticated linguistic reasoning. VisDoMRAG employs a multi-step reasoning process encompassing evidence curation and chain-of-thought reasoning for concurrent textual and visual RAG pipelines. A key novelty of VisDoMRAG is its consistency-constrained modality fusion mechanism, which aligns the reasoning processes across modalities at inference time to produce a coherent final answer. This leads to enhanced accuracy in scenarios where critical information is distributed across modalities and improved answer verifiability through implicit context attribution. Through extensive experiments involving open-source and proprietary large language models, we benchmark state-of-the-art document QA methods on VisDoMBench. Extensive results show that VisDoMRAG outperforms unimodal and long-context LLM baselines for end-to-end multimodal document QA by 12-20%.
title VisDoM: Multi-Document QA with Visually Rich Elements Using Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10704