ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models

Abstract

Documents are visually rich structures that convey information through text, but also figures, page layouts, tables, or even fonts. Since modern retrieval systems mainly rely on the textual information they extract from document pages to index documents -often through lengthy and brittle processes-, they struggle to exploit key visual cues efficiently. This limits their capabilities in many practical document retrieval applications such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). To benchmark current systems on visually rich document retrieval, we introduce the Visual Document Retrieval Benchmark ViDoRe, composed of various page-level retrieval tasks spanning multiple domains, languages, and practical settings. The inherent complexity and performance shortcomings of modern systems motivate a new concept; doing document retrieval by directly embedding the images of the document pages. We release ColPali, a Vision Language Model trained to produce high-quality multi-vector embeddings from images of document pages. Combined with a late interaction matching mechanism, ColPali largely outperforms modern document retrieval pipelines while being drastically simpler, faster and end-to-end trainable. We release models, data, code and benchmarks under open licenses at https://hf.co/vidore.