MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multi-Modal Retrieval for Long Documents
Authors: name: Kuicai Dong, name: Yujing Chang, name: Xin Deik Goh, name: Dexun Li, name: Ruiming Tang, name: Yong Liu

Multi-modal document retrieval is designed to identify and retrieve various
forms of multi-modal content, such as figures, tables, charts, and layout
information from extensive documents. Despite its significance, there is a
notable lack of a robust benchmark to effectively evaluate the performance of
systems in multi-modal document retrieval. To address this gap, this work
introduces a new benchmark, named as MMDocIR, encompassing two distinct tasks:
page-level and layout-level retrieval. The former focuses on localizing the
most relevant pages within a long document, while the latter targets the
detection of specific layouts, offering a more fine-grained granularity than
whole-page analysis. A layout can refer to a variety of elements such as
textual paragraphs, equations, figures, tables, or charts. The MMDocIR
benchmark comprises a rich dataset featuring expertly annotated labels for
1,685 questions and bootstrapped labels for 173,843 questions, making it a
pivotal resource for advancing multi-modal document retrieval for both training
and evaluation. Through rigorous experiments, we reveal that (i) visual
retrievers significantly outperform their text counterparts, (ii) MMDocIR train
set can effectively benefit the training process of multi-modal document
retrieval and (iii) text retrievers leveraging on VLM-text perform much better
than those using OCR-text. These findings underscores the potential advantages
of integrating visual elements for multi-modal document retrieval.