Multimodal Document RAG with Llama 3.2 Vision and ColQwen2

The text discusses a new method called ColPali for indexing and embedding document pages directly, bypassing the need for complex extraction pipelines. Combined with cutting-edge multimodal models like Llama 3.2 vision series, ColPali enables AI systems to reason over images of documents, enabling a more flexible and robust multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework. The traditional approach involves OCR for scanned text, language vision models to interpret visual elements like charts and tables, and augmenting text and descriptions with structural metadata such as page and section numbers. ColPali directly indexes and embeds document pages as images, retrieving based on visual semantic similarity. It can handle complex document formats efficiently and accurately while preserving the original document layout. The new series of Llama 3.2 vision models use a technique called visual instruction tuning to imbue LLMs with vision capabilities, allowing them to process images and complete multimodal RAG workflows.