Ana-Luiza Rusnac

Multimodal Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Scientific Document Understanding using Open-Source SLMs

Results demonstrate a 157% improvement in retrieval quality over a Naive-RAG baseline, with only 50 ms additional la tency, while Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct achieved results comparable to cloud-based models in BERTScore, validate that open-source optimized SLMs, paired with advanced retrieval strategies, can provide competitive performance for document understanding without relying on cloud-based models.