CHaystack: Benchmarking Chinese Document Retrieval and VQA

Abstract

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has made substantial progress in extending the memory of large language models (LLMs), and recent advances have further pushed RAG from pure text settings toward multimodal scenarios. In the document understanding domain, document visual question answering (DocumentVQA) has evolved from question answering over a single document to retrieval-and-generation pipelines over large-scale document collections. However, a benchmark specifically designed for Chinese large-scale document retrieval and question answering is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce CHaystack, a new Chinese DocumentVQA benchmark that covers four document categories, namely academic papers, advertisements, web pages, and real-world photographed documents, enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of DocumentVQA systems. In addition, we present CDocRAG, a Chinese DocumentVQA system that uses a VLM-based relevance filter to verify retrieved document images before answer generation. We evaluate representative open-source embedding and generation models on CHaystack. The results reveal a clear contrast in category-wise strengths: Qwen-family models perform best on text-rich documents such as webpages and papers, whereas other models only achieve competitive results on visually rich categories such as advertisements and degrade sharply on text-dense documents. For retrieval, Qwen3-VL reaches 71.91 Recall@1 while the best non-Qwen model achieves only 14.40. These results indicate that the core challenge of CHaystack lies in Chinese textual encoding, and that Chinese large-scale DocumentVQA still leaves substantial room for improvement. Our code and dateset is available at https://github.com/hanxi19/CHaystack.