M-Longdoc: A Benchmark For Multimodal Super-Long Document Understanding And A Retrieval-Aware Tuning Framework

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission13834 Authors

28 Sept 2024 (modified: 28 Nov 2024)ICLR 2025 Conference SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: multimodal, document, benchmark, retrieval
TL;DR: M-LongDoc is a new benchmark and framework for evaluating and improving multimodal models' ability to understand and answer questions about lengthy, diverse documents containing text, figures, and tables.
Abstract: The ability to understand and answer questions over documents can be useful in many business and practical applications. However, documents often contain lengthy and diverse multimodal contents such as texts, figures, and tables, which are very time-consuming for humans to read thoroughly. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop effective and automated methods to aid humans in this task. In this work, we introduce M-LongDoc, a benchmark of 851 samples, and an automated framework to evaluate the performance of large multimodal models. We further propose a retrieval-aware tuning approach for efficient and effective multimodal document reading. Compared to existing works, our benchmark consists of more recent and lengthy documents with hundreds of pages, while also requiring open-ended solutions and not just extractive answers. To our knowledge, our training framework is the first to directly address the retrieval setting for multimodal long documents. To enable tuning open-source models, we construct a training corpus in a fully automatic manner for the question-answering task over such documents. Experiments show that our tuning approach achieves a relative improvement of 4.6% for the correctness of model responses, compared to the baseline open-source models.
Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks
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Submission Number: 13834
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