MCERF: Advancing Multimodal LLM Evaluation of Engineering Documentation with Enhanced Retrieval

arXiv:2604.09552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering rulebooks and technical standards contain multimodal information like dense text, tables, and illustrations that are challenging for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. Building upon the DesignQA framework [1], which relied on full-text ingestion and text-based retrieval, this work establishes a Multimodal ColPali Enhanced Retrieval and Reasoning Framework (MCERF), a system that couples a multimodal retriever with large lang