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Mixture-of-RAG: Integrating Text and Tables with Large Language Models
arXiv:2504.09554v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve optimal utility when their responses are grounded in external knowledge sources. However, real-world documents, such as annual reports, scientific papers, and clinical guidelines, frequently combine extensive narrative content with complex, hierarchically structured tables. While existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems effectively integrate LLMs' generative capabilities with external retrieval-based information, their performance significantly deteriorates especially processing such heterogeneous text-table hierarchies. To address this limitation, we formalize the task of Heterogeneous Document RAG, which requires joint retrieval and reasoning across textual and hierarchical tabular data. We propose MixRAG, a novel three-stage framework: (i) hierarchy row-and-column-level (H-RCL) representation that preserves hierarchical structure and heterogeneous relationship, (ii) an ensemble retriever with LLM-based reranking for evidence alignment, and (iii) multi-step reasoning decomposition via a RECAP prompt strategy. To bridge the gap in available data for this domain, we release the dataset DocRAGLib, a 2k-document corpus paired with automatically aligned text-table summaries and gold document annotations. The comprehensive experiment results demonstrate that MixRAG boosts top-1 retrieval by 46% over strong text-only, table-only, and naive-mixture baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art performance for mixed-modality document grounding.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve optimal utility when their responses are grounded in external knowledge sources. However, real-world documents, such as annual reports, scientific papers, and clinical guidelines, frequently combine extensive narrative content with complex, hierarchically structured tables. While existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems effectively integrate LLMs' generative capabilities with external retrieval-based information, their performance significantly deteriorates especially processing such heterogeneous text-table hierarchies. To address this limitation, we formalize the task of Heterogeneous Document RAG, which requires joint retrieval and reasoning across textual and hierarchical tabular data. We propose MixRAG, a novel three-stage framework: (i) hierarchy row-and-column-level (H-RCL) representation that preserves hierarchical structure and heterogeneous relationship, (ii) an ensemble retriever with LLM-based reranking for evidence alignment, and (iii) multi-step reasoning decomposition via a RECAP prompt strategy. To bridge the gap in available data for this domain, we release the dataset DocRAGLib, a 2k-document corpus paired with automatically aligned text-table summaries and gold document annotations. The comprehensive experiment results demonstrate that MixRAG boosts top-1 retrieval by 46% over strong text-only, table-only, and naive-mixture baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art performance for mixed-modality document grounding.
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