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arXiv · 2510.22215

Hybrid-Vector Retrieval for Visually Rich Documents: Combining Single-Vector Efficiency and Multi-Vector Accuracy

Abstract

Retrieval over visually rich documents is essential for tasks such as legal discovery, scientific search, and enterprise knowledge management. Existing approaches fall into two paradigms: single-vector retrieval, which is efficient but coarse, and multi-vector retrieval, which is accurate but computationally expensive. To address this trade-off, we propose HEAVEN, a plug-and-play two-stage hybrid-vector framework. In the first stage, HEAVEN efficiently retrieves candidate pages using a single-vector method over Visually-Summarized Pages (VS-Pages), which assemble representative visual layouts from multiple pages. In the second stage, it reranks candidates with a multi-vector method while filtering query tokens by linguistic importance to reduce redundant computations. To evaluate retrieval systems under realistic conditions, we also introduce ViMDoc, a benchmark for visually rich, multi-document, and long-document retrieval. Across four benchmarks, HEAVEN attains 99.87% of the Recall@1 performance of multi-vector models on average while reducing per-query computation by 99.82%, achieving efficiency and accuracy. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/juyeonnn/HEAVEN

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Juyeon Kim, Geon Lee, Dongwon Choi, Taeuk Kim, Kijung Shin. 2026-04-20. Hybrid-Vector Retrieval for Visually Rich Documents: Combining Single-Vector Efficiency and Multi-Vector Accuracy. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22215

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