Data Party THU

Aug 15, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Why Naive Text Chunking Breaks RAG and How to Build a Better Alternative

The article explains how simple character‑ or page‑based chunking destroys the spatial and semantic relationships of tables, figures, formulas and headings in PDFs, proposes a structure‑aware multimodal RAG pipeline that restores layout via layout detection, visual description generation, modal enhancement and cross‑encoder re‑ranking, and shows that these steps dramatically improve retrieval quality, especially for visual queries.