{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/benchmarking-retrieval-augmented-multimomal","title":"Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Multimomal Generation for Document Question Answering","arxiv_id":"2505.16470","date":"2025-05-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kuicai Dong","Yujing Chang","Shijie Huang","Yasheng Wang","Ruiming Tang","Yong liu"],"abstract":"Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) faces dual challenges in processing lengthy multimodal documents (text, images, tables) and performing cross-modal reasoning. Current document retrieval-augmented generation (DocRAG) methods remain limited by their text-centric approaches, frequently missing critical visual information. The field also lacks robust benchmarks for assessing multimodal evidence selection and integration. We introduce MMDocRAG, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 4,055 expert-annotated QA pairs with multi-page, cross-modal evidence chains. Our framework introduces innovative metrics for evaluating multimodal quote selection and enables answers that interleave text with relevant visual elements. Through large-scale experiments with 60 VLM/LLM models and 14 retrieval systems, we identify persistent challenges in multimodal evidence retrieval, selection, and integration.Key findings reveal advanced proprietary LVMs show superior performance than open-sourced alternatives. Also, they show moderate advantages using multimodal inputs over text-only inputs, while open-source alternatives show significant performance degradation. Notably, fine-tuned LLMs achieve substantial improvements when using detailed image descriptions. MMDocRAG establishes a rigorous testing ground and provides actionable insights for developing more robust multimodal DocVQA systems. Our benchmark and code are available at https://mmdocrag.github.io/MMDocRAG/.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16470v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16470v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"benchmarking-retrieval-augmented-multimomal","repo_url":"https://github.com/mmdocrag/mmdocrag","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"evidence-selection","task_name":"Evidence Selection"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval-augmented-generation","task_name":"Retrieval-augmented Generation"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.16470","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2505.16470"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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