Introduction
Most retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems assume that documents are clean, structured, and text-based. But in enterprise environments, the reality is different. Documents often contain:
- Tables with nested headers, merged cells, or embedded footnotes
- Charts and images that convey critical insights
- Layout-heavy formats like invoices, reports, or scanned documents
When such content passes through standard RAG pipelines, the results are often poor - irrelevant retrieval and hallucinated outputs during generation.
This post explores practical strategies to enable accurate retrieval and grounded generation from messy, multimodal documents. We focus on two key stages:
- Retrieval – How to index and surface relevant content that isn’t just plain text
- Generation – How to present structured or visual content to an LLM for high-quality answers
We’ll cover proven architectures, model recommendations, and implementation details used in real-world production systems.
Why Tables and Images Break Traditional RAG
A typical RAG pipeline looks like this:
- Split the document into text chunks (paragraphs, sections)
- Serialize as plaintext or Markdown
- Embed with a text model (e.g., text-embedding-3, BGE, Cohere)
- Store embeddings in a vector database (e.g., FAISS, Qdrant)
- Retrieve top-k relevant chunks
- Inject them into an LLM for answer generation
This pipeline breaks down when documents include:
- Tables: Markdown flattens structure. Semantics like merged headers or totals are lost.
- Images: Often dropped or processed via low-quality OCR, losing charts and diagrams.
- Scanned Layouts: Visual hierarchy and multi-column formats disappear during text flattening.
The result: Important context is invisible to retrieval and misrepresented during generation.
Strategy 1: Full-Document Multimodal Embedding
Skip text serialization entirely. Instead, render the entire document as images and embed using a multimodal model that understands layout, tables, and visual context.
Pipeline:
- Render each document page to an image (e.g., with Poppler or PDFPlumber)
- Pass each page image to a multimodal model:
- Open source: CoLLaMA, OpenCLIP, SigLIP, BLIP-2
- Commercial: jina, XDoc, LayoutXLM (token-based)
- Open source: CoLLaMA, OpenCLIP, SigLIP, BLIP-2
- Store embeddings in your vector index
Why It Works:
- Multimodal models trained on image+text pairs preserve layout, structure, and non-textual info
- No need for lossy flattening or serialization heuristics
Caveats:
- Fewer production-grade models are available
- Retrofitting may require reindexing
- Higher compute and memory costs
Strategy 2: Visual Summarization for Text-Based Stacks
If you’re sticking with text-only embeddings, you can still integrate visual content using descriptive captions.
Pipeline:
- Pipeline:
- Segment the document into layout blocks using:
- AWS Textract
- Azure Document Intelligence
- LayoutParser + Tesseract (open source)
- For each table or image block, run OCR and generate a text summary using a multimodal LLM:
- Hosted: GPT-4 Vision, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro
- Open source: LLaVA 1.5, MiniGPT-4, Kosmos-2
- Prompt example:
"Summarize this table, including headers, key values, and trends." - Append summaries to surrounding text and embed the result using your existing model (e.g., text-embedding-3, bge-large-en)
- Segment the document into layout blocks using:
- Example Chunk:
“Table Summary: Q1 revenue by region shows APAC growth of 23%, EMEA flat, and a YoY increase in total revenue of 11%. See Figure 4.”
This lets visual information participate in search relevance scoring - without changing your pipeline.
Pros:
- Easy integration
- Compatible with any retriever or vector DB
- Enables semantic search over image/table content
Cons:
- Summaries may lose granularity
- Requires preprocessing for all visual elements
Generation Over Structured and Visual Content
Once you retrieve relevant chunks, you need models that can reason over visual and structured inputs.
Text-only LLMs often fail due to:
- Flattened or malformed formatting (especially tables)
- Missing image content
- Lost spatial or layout context
Solution:
Use vision-capable LLMs during generation. These models accept image inputs and can reason over full document renders.
Supported Models:
- GPT-4 Turbo (Vision)
- Claude 3.5 Opus
- Gemini 1.5 Pro
- LLaMA 3.2 Vision (70B, self-hosted)
- Yi-VL, Qwen-VL
Benefits:
- No need for text serialization
- Direct reasoning over charts, tables, and layout
- Accurate answers to layout-grounded queries like “What does this figure show?”
Integration Tip:
Pass full document context (e.g., PDF render or HTML snapshot) into your generation model. Cross-modal attention models (like LLaMA 3.2 Vision) handle this better than concatenation-based ones.
Toolchain Summary
Document Segmentation - AWS Textract, Azure Form Recognizer, LayoutParser
OCR - Tesseract, EasyOCR
Multimodal Summarization - GPT-4V, Claude 3, Gemini, LLaVA, MiniGPT-4
Text Embedding - text-embedding-3, bge-large-en, Cohere Embed
Multimodal Embedding - CoLLaMA, SigLIP, XDoc, OpenCLIP
Vision Generation - GPT-4V, Claude 3.5, LLaMA 3.2 Vision, Yi-VL
Conclusion
Traditional RAG fails when applied to structured and visual content. Tables, figures, and layout matter, especially in high-stakes domains like finance, law, and enterprise analytics.
To close the gap:
- Use multimodal embedding for full-fidelity search
- Or adopt visual summarization to extend existing pipelines
- Use vision-capable models at generation time for grounded, reliable outputs
Multimodal RAG isn’t theoretical - it’s operational. With the right tools and strategies, you can bring structure, charts, and layout into your RAG workflows - and generate responses grounded in the full reality of enterprise documents.