FM2DS: Few-Shot Multimodal Multihop Data Synthesis with Knowledge Distillation for Question Answering

Abstract

Multimodal multihop question answering (MMQA) requires reasoning over images and text from multiple sources. Despite advances in visual question answering, this multihop setting remains underexplored due to a lack of quality datasets. Existing methods focus on single-hop, single-modality, or short texts, limiting real-world applications like interpreting educational documents with long, multimodal content. To fill this gap, we introduce FM2DS, the first framework for creating a high-quality dataset for MMQA. Our approach consists of a 5-stage pipeline that involves acquiring relevant multimodal documents from Wikipedia, synthetically generating high-level questions and answers, and validating them through rigorous criteria to ensure data quality. We evaluate our methodology by training models on our synthesized dataset and testing on two benchmarks: MultimodalQA and WebQA. Our results demonstrate that, with an equal sample size, models trained on our synthesized data outperform those trained on human-collected data by 1.9 in exact match (EM) score on average. Additionally, we introduce M2QA-Bench with 1k samples, the first benchmark for MMQA on long documents, generated using FM2DS and refined by human annotators. We believe our data synthesis method will serve as a strong foundation for training and evaluating MMQA models.