Beyond Retrieval: Joint Supervision and Multimodal Document Ranking for Textbook Question Answering
Textbook question answering (TQA) is a complex task, requiring the interpretation of complex multimodal context. Although recent advances have improved overall performance, they often encounter difficulties in educational settings where accurate semantic alignment and task-specific document retrieval are essential. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to multimodal textbook question answering by introducing a mechanism for enhancing semantic representations through multi-objective joint training. Our model, Joint Embedding Training With Ranking Supervision for Textbook Question Answering (JETRTQA), is a multimodal learning framework built on a retriever--generator architecture that uses a retrieval-augmented generation setup, in which a multimodal large language model generates answers. JETRTQA is designed to improve the relevance of retrieved documents in complex educational contexts. Unlike traditional direct scoring approaches, JETRTQA learns to refine the semantic representations of questions and documents through a supervised signal that combines pairwise ranking and implicit supervision derived from answers. We evaluate our method on the CK12-QA dataset and demonstrate that it significantly improves the discrimination between informative and irrelevant documents, even when they are long, complex, and multimodal. JETRTQA outperforms the previous state of the art, achieving a 2.4\% gain in accuracy on the validation set and 11.1\% on the test set.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Document RankingLarge Language ModelMultimodal Large Language ModelQuestion AnsweringRetrievalRetrieval-augmented GenerationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Attention Grounded Enhancement for Visual Document Retrieval
Visual document retrieval requires understanding heterogeneous and multi-modal content to satisfy implicit information needs. Recent advances use screenshot-based document encoding with fine-grained late interaction to e…
Unsupervised Multimodal Representation Learning across Medical Images and Reports
Joint embeddings between medical imaging modalities and associated radiology reports have the potential to offer significant benefits to the clinical community, ranging from cross-domain retrieval to conditional generati…
Representation LearningRetrievalOmni-Embed-Nemotron: A Unified Multimodal Retrieval Model for Text, Image, Audio, and Video
We present Omni-Embed-Nemotron, a unified multimodal retrieval embedding model developed to handle the increasing complexity of real-world information needs. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly a…
Video RetrievalBeyond Bag-of-Patches: Learning Global Layout via Textual Supervision for Late-Interaction Visual Document Retrieval
Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) models mostly rely on late interaction architectures, in which documents are represented by a set of local patch embeddings and then matched against query tokens. While efficient, this arc…
UNIDOC-BENCH: A Unified Benchmark for Document-Centric Multimodal RAG
Multimodal retrieval-augmented Generation (MM-RAG) is a key approach for applying large language models (LLMs) and agents to real-world knowledge bases, yet current evaluations are fragmented -- focusing on either text o…
Visual Question AnsweringLogical Reasoning