Balancing Reasoning and Hardware Constraints in RAG Pipelines for Ukrainian Multi-Domain Document Understanding

Abstract

This paper describes the system submitted to the UNLP 2026 Shared Task on Multi-Domain Document Understanding. The challenge required extracting precise answers, document IDs, and page numbers from a diverse corpus of Ukrainian PDF documents within a strict 9-hour offline Kaggle execution limit. During evaluation on the hidden private test set, optical character recognition (OCR) of scanned documents emerged as a severe bottleneck, consuming 5-7 hours of the total time budget due to sequential single-threaded execution. This overhead strictly limited the remaining time for Large Language Model (LLM) inference to approximately two hours for 500 questions. To guarantee pipeline completion without timeouts, we developed a resource-efficient Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline utilizing BM25, BGE-M3, and Cross-Encoder reranking. Rather than deploying parameter-heavy reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek R1) which consistently timed out, we utilized a 4-bit quantized LapaLLM 12B model via llama.cpp on dual NVIDIA T4 GPUs. Prioritizing pipeline stability over multi-step reasoning, our system achieved a Private Score of 0.8095, placing 10th out of 15 active teams.