Multimodal Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Scientific Document Understanding using Open-Source SLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24799v1
• Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:32:09 GMT
• Title: Multimodal Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Scientific Document Understanding using Open-Source SLMs
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models tend to hallucinate when answering domain-specific ques tions from scientific documents without prior fine-tuning.<n>This paper presents an Advanced Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation system that aims to solve those challenges.<n>Results demonstrate a 157% improvement in retrieval quality over a Naive-RAG baseline, with only 50 ms additional la tency, while Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct achieved results comparable to cloud-based models in BERTScore.
• Score: 45.88028371034407
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models tend to hallucinate when answering domain-specific ques tions from scientific documents without prior fine-tuning. Currently, methods such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation partially solve this problem but face different challenges: limited context knowledge, difference between sparse and dense retrieval, and retrieval noise. This paper presents an Advanced Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation system that aims to solve those challenges and im prove the accuracy of information extraction. The proposed architecture introduces a multimodal ingestion pipeline that leverages an open-source Vision-Language Model (Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct) to generate textual summaries of tables and fig ures. The retrieval phase integrates HNSW-based semantic search with GIN-based lexical search, unified through Reciprocal Rank Fusion and refined using Cross Encoder reranking to minimize retrieval noise. To ensure conversational coherence across multi-turn interactions, a Query Condenser module is employed. Evaluation is conducted by independently assessing the ingestion, retrieval and generation stages using the MMLongBench benchmark, a BeIR-format synthetic dataset and the DeepEval framework. Moreover, results demonstrate a 157% improvement in retrieval quality over a Naive-RAG baseline, with only 50 ms additional la tency, while Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct achieved results comparable to cloud-based models in BERTScore. These findings validate that open-source optimized SLMs, paired with advanced retrieval strategies, can provide competitive performance for document understanding without relying on cloud-based models.

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