Low Resource RAG: From Slide Data Processing to RAG Systems Public

Abstract

To advance the understanding and development of successful retrieval-augmented generation systems, we examine various components to identify essential elements and potential performance improvements across different methodologies. Through collaboration with Hyundai, we develop a low-resource domain retrieval-augmented generation system designed to answer questions about automotive safety collision tests using information from multimodal slides. Our approach introduces a novel, language model-centric data processing pipeline that effectively transforms slide information into textual content suitable for retrieval and answer generation. We evaluate the performance of different state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation frameworks on our processed data, as well as different variations of embedding models. To assess our system's effectiveness, we generate synthetic question-answer pairs from our refined data to test the accuracy of different retrieval models. Furthermore, we create additional synthetic question-answer pairs specifically targeting the multimodal table and chart information extracted from the slides. Our findings indicate that utilizing fine-tuned embedding models and language models with the original retrieval-augmented generation framework achieves the highest accuracy. We also finetune Vision Large Language Models to see if open-sourcing our data processing pipeline is possible. We conclude by outlining next steps to encourage research toward developing open-source retrieval-augmented generation frameworks for low-resource domains.

Table of Contents

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Background and Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 Research Objective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1.3 Thesis Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2 Background 6

2.1 Background and trends in NLP and

information systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.2 Exploring Retrieval-Augmented Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

2.3 Embedding Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

2.4 Fine-tuning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2.5 Multimodal Data Processing in RAG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.5.1 Synthetic QA and Data Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Approach 16

3.1 Data Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

3.1.1 Dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

3.1.2 Slide Data Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

3.1.3 Additional Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

3.1.4 Synthetic QA Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

3.1.5 Evaluation of Synthetic Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

3.2 Embedding Model - BGE-M3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

3.2.1 Fine-Tuning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

3.3 RAG Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

3.3.1 Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

3.3.2 Storage of Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

3.3.3 Evaluation of Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

3.4 Open Source VLLMs for OCR Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

3.4.1 Fine-tuning VLLM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

3.4.2 Data Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

3.4.3 Evaluation of VLLM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Experiments 34

4.1 Evaluation of RAG and Embedding Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

4.2 Evaluation of Table and Chart Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

4.3 Evaluation of VLLM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Analysis 41

5.1 Synthetic Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

5.1.1 Qualitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

5.1.2 Quantitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

5.2 RAG Frameworks & Retrieval Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

5.2.1 Embedding Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

5.2.2 RAG Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

5.3 Qwen 2.5 VL Fine-tuning Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

5.3.1 Image Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

5.3.2 Base Model vs. Finetuned Model Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

5.3.3 LLM Judge Preference - Qualitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . 52

Conclusion 54

6.0.1 Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

6.0.2 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Appendix 57

A.0.1 Converting image-to-text prompt: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

A.0.2 Correction of results: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Bibliography 60

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Computer Science
Degree	B.S.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Computer Science
Mot-clé	LLM Multimodal Data Data Processing RAG VLLM Question-answering Information Retrieval Retrieval Augmented Generation QA system Knowledge System
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Jinho D. Choi, Emory University
Committee Members	Joyce C. Ho, Emory University Sharon Sonenblum, Emory University

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