Hugging Face Blog

Visual Document Retrieval Goes Multilingual

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

L\"etzCross: A Cross-Lingual Page-Level Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval over Luxembourgish Documents

arXiv:2608.21714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent page-image retrievers such as ColPali have improved retrieval over visually rich documents, yet little is known about how they behave in cross-l...

By Omar El Bachyr, Fred Philippy, Laura Maria Bernardy, Saad Ezzini, Jacques Klein, Tegawende Bissyande
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

SEA-CLIP-Tiny: Efficient Multilingual Text-Vision Embedding for Southeast Asian Languages

SEA-CLIP-Tiny is a compact multilingual text‑vision embedding model designed for Southeast Asian languages, containing fewer than 50 million parameters. It adapts a CLIP‑KD framework with region‑specific data curation and multilingual teacher guidance. Across seven languages, it outperforms other student models, achieving R@1 = 12.9%, R@5 = 31.5%, and R@10 = 42.2%, and surpasses MobileCLIP2 by 12.1 points in R@10 while using 38.4% fewer parameters and lower CPU latency.

By Puja Ahmad Habibi, Faiz Assabil Firdaus, Ashvanth S, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Pume Tuchinda, Peerat Limkonchotiwat
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Evaluating Perspectival Biases in Cross-Modal Retrieval

arXiv:2510.26861v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal retrieval systems are expected to operate in a semantic space, agnostic to the language or cultural origin of the query. In practi...

By Teerapol Saengsukhiran, Peerawat Chomphooyod, Narabodee Rodjananant, Chompakorn Chaksangchaichot, Patawee Prakrankamanant, Witthawin Sripheanpol, Pak Lovichit, Sarana Nutanong, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich
arXiv AI
Sep 2

MIDR: Enrichment-Augmented Indexing for Multimodal Document Retrieval

MIDR (Multimodal Indexing for Document Retrieval) is a training‑free framework that enriches document indexes by converting rendered pages into verified textual fields with a multimodal LLM, then indexing those fields with BM25F and optionally fusing with dense retrieval. By shifting multimodal reasoning to index time, MIDR enables text‑centric serving while retaining multimodal evidence, achieving a 23.0% relative gain over BM25 on ViDoRe V3 and outperforming ColQwen2.5 on several domains with significantly smaller index memory and lower query latency.

By Debanjan Mahata, Atharva Tendle, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Yong Zhuang, Ozan Irsoy
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

VisDocAgentBench: Benchmarking Agents for Visually Rich Document Retrieval

VisDocAgentBench is a closed‑corpus benchmark that evaluates static versus agentic retrieval for visually rich documents, using 2,375 pages from 100 documents and 120 queries that span direct, one‑bridge, and two‑bridge evidence structures. The benchmark includes semantic, relational, and visual queries, full‑document review, and hard‑negative validation. Results show that a strong visual retriever performs well on direct items but poorly on two‑bridge items, while agents improve performance, especially when using visual retrieval and iterative search capabilities.

By Lexiang Hu, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Dingkun Long, Yikang Li, Fuwei Zhang, Yisen Wang, Zhouchen Lin