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Adityav369on Don't bother parsing: Just use images for RAG

You can ask the model to describe the image, but that is inherently lossy. What if it is a chart and the model gets most x, y pairs, but the user asks about a missing "x" or "y" value. Presenting the image at inference is effective since you're guaranteeing that the LLM is able to answer exactly the user's question. The only blocker here becomes how good retrieval is, and that's a smaller problem to solve. This approach allows us to only solve for passing in relevant context, the rest is taken care of by the LLM, otherwise the problem space expands to correct OCR, parsing, and getting all possible descriptions to images from the model.

Adityav369on Don't bother parsing: Just use images for RAG

Yeah the fine tuning is definitely the best part.

Often, the blocker becomes high quality eval sets (which I guess always is the blocker).

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

Mainly to maintain layout information. Also search becomes easier this way.

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

We do use ColQwen! Currently 2, but upgrading to 2.5 soon :)

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

Yeah we had an overload on the ingestion queue. If you try again will be much faster as we just moved to a beefier machine. (The previous ingestion will still work since it is in queue, but new ones will be faster)

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

Depending on the use case, it happily runs on my MacBook air M2 16GB ram with mps for small pdfs, and searching over 100-150 documents with colpali takes a 2-ish minutes. Very rough numbers. For ingestion, takes around 15-20-ish seconds a page, which is on the slower end. On an A100, it takes 4-5 seconds per page for ingestion using Colpali to run (we haven't performance optimized, or optimized batch sizes yet tho). Without Colpali it is much faster. Ingestion doesn't change much as size grows.

I'd be happy to report back after some testing, we are looking to optimize more of this soon, as speed is somewhat of a missing piece at the moment.

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

For ingesting graphs, you can define a filter, or certain document ids. When updating, we look at if any other docs are added with that filer (or you can specify new doc ids). We then do entity and relationship extraction again, and do entity resolution with the existing graph to merge the two.

Creating graphs and entity resolution are both tunable with overrides, you can specify domain specific prompts and overrides (will add a pharma example!) (https://docs.morphik.ai/python-sdk/create_graph#parameters). I tried to add code, but was formatting badly, sorry for the redirect.

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

You can run this fully locally using Ollama for inference, although you'll need larger models and a beefy machine for great results. On my end llama 3.2 8B does a good job on technical docs, but bigger the better lol.

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

Thanks we should have been more clear. The part in ee is our UI, which can be used to test or in dev environments. The main code, including API, SDK, and the entire backend logic is MIT expat.

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

Do you mean ingesting the extracted rectangles/ bounding boxes? We're actually working on bounding boxes, this is a good insight and we can add this to the product. However, the way we ingest is literally converting each page to an image then embedding that so the text, layout, diagrams are all encoded in. Would like to know what the exact use case is, can help you better

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

Depends on your document types.

If you're using txts, then plain RAG built on top of any vector database can suffice depending on your queries (if they directly reference the text, or can be made to, then similarity search is good enough). If they are cross document, setting a high number of chunks with plain RAG to retrieve might also do a good job.

If you have tables, images, etc. then using a better extraction mechanism (maybe unstructured, or other document processors) and then creating the embeddings can also work well.

I'd say if docs are simple, then just building your own pipeline on top of a vector db is good!

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

We have two ingestion pathways: 1. regular OCR + text embeddings; 2. Colpali. We've observed that Colpali does a much better job with tables since it can encode positional stuff and layouts as well.

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

The paid part applies to the ui-component which provides a chat user interface. The core code, SDK, api is all under MIT license.

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally

Thanks for pointing that out! Fixed it.

For the metadata extraction, we save these as Column(JSONB) for each documents which allows it to be changed on the fly.

Although, I keep wondering if it would have been better to use something like mongodb for this part, just because it's more natural.

Please let me know if you have questions and how it works out for you.

Adityav369on Show HN: Morphik – Open-source MCP server for technical document search

Apologies for the poor formatting!

Features:

- Multimodal search across text, diagrams, and videos

- Natural language knowledge base management

- Fully open-source with responsive support

Adityav369on Show HN: I built an offline open-source RAG system DataBridge

Good question! You can use any open source or private model you want with this (just by changing one line in `databridge.toml`), whereas notebook lm is limited to gemini. While our UI component allows it to be used as an open source notebook lm alternative, it is developed for developers building AI apps and doing context management. We are working on adding techniques like CAG (cache augmented generation) and graphRAG for better and more flexible querying, and have custom embedding pipelines for different data types.

Adityav369on Show HN: Automate your social media workflow

Thank you. Definitely! We have cross posting for linkedin and instagram as of now. Integrating ActivityPub/ Fediverse is on our list.

Have you personally faced this issue/ know of anyone who has been looking for a solution to fill this market hole? Would love to know more.

Adityav369on Show HN: Automate your social media workflow

How to use/demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6twwYsYNKI&t=1s

Hey HN! My brother and I are building BrandSync AI to address a problem we identified while talking with businesses: Businesses have existing brand assets like catalogs, PDFs, images, etc, but struggle to translate these into effective social media content. BrandSync AI leverages these assets, along with platform-specific best practices, to generate social media posts.

We'd love to get your feedback on the product and would love to connect if this can help solve any of y'alls problems. Let us know what you think!