# Benchmarking Multimodal RAG through a Chart-based Document Question-Answering Generation Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14864 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14864/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 30 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [Ragas: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15217/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13601/) (2024)
- [RAFT: Adapting Language Model to Domain Specific RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10131/) (2024)
- [VisRAG: Vision-based Retrieval-augmented Generation on Multi-modality Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10594/) (2024)
- [MuRAG: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generator for Open Question Answering over Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02928/) (2022)
- [ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01449/) (2024)
- [MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01523/) (2024)
- [MultiModalQA: Complex Question Answering over Text, Tables and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06039/) (2021)
- [Multimodal ArXiv: A Dataset for Improving Scientific Comprehension of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00231/) (2024)
- [Retrieving Multimodal Information for Augmented Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10868/) (2023)
- [MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis For Universal Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14475/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation with Dynamic VQA Dataset and Self-adaptive Planning Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02937/) (2024)
- [Jina CLIP: Your CLIP Model Is Also Your Text Retriever](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20204/) (2024)
- [MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08828/) (2025)
- [MRAG-Bench: Vision-Centric Evaluation for Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08182/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Multimodal Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02233/) (2024)
- [PDF-MVQA: A Dataset for Multimodal Information Retrieval in PDF-based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12720/) (2024)
- [FM2DS: Few-Shot Multimodal Multihop Data Synthesis with Knowledge Distillation for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07030/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Stable-RAG: Mitigating Retrieval-Permutation-Induced Hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02993/) (2026)
- [Retrieval as Generation: A Unified Framework with Self-Triggered Information Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11407/) (2026)
- [MRAG-Suite: A Diagnostic Evaluation Platform for Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24253/) (2025)
- [CFVBench: A Comprehensive Video Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09266/) (2025)
- [Roles of MLLMs in Visually Rich Document Retrieval for RAG: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03262/) (2025)
- [M4-RAG: A Massive-Scale Multilingual Multi-Cultural Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05959/) (2025)
- [ChartWalker: Benchmarking the Cross-Chart RAG Task with Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23997/) (2026)
- [TopoGraphRAG-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal GraphRAG on Layout-Grounded Evidence Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09360/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) enhances reasoning capabilities by integrating external knowledge. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts that are prevalent in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce a novel task, Chart-based MRAG, to address this limitation. To semi-automatically generate high-quality evaluation samples, we propose CHARt-based document question-answering GEneration (CHARGE), a framework that produces evaluation data through structured keypoint extraction, crossmodal verification, and keypoint-based generation. By combining CHARGE with expert validation, we construct Chart-MRAG Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for chart-based MRAG evaluation, featuring 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents. Our evaluation reveals three critical limitations in current approaches: (1) unified multimodal embedding retrieval methods struggles in chart-based scenarios, (2) even with ground-truth retrieval, state-of-the-art MLLMs achieve only 58.19% Correctness and 73.87% Coverage scores, and (3) MLLMs demonstrate consistent text-over-visual modality bias during Chart-based MRAG reasoning. The CHARGE and Chart-MRAG Bench are released at https://github.com/Nomothings/CHARGE.git.