From BM25 to Corrective RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval Strategies for Text-and-Table Documents

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems critically depend on retrieval quality, yet no systematic comparison of modern retrieval methods exists for heterogeneous documents containing both text and tabular data. We benchmark ten retrieval strategies spanning sparse, dense, hybrid fusion, cross-encoder reranking, query expansion, index augmentation, and adaptive retrieval on a challenging financial QA benchmark of 23,088 queries over 7,318 documents with mixed text-and-table content. We evaluate retrieval quality via Recall@k, MRR, and nDCG, and end-to-end generation quality via Number Match, with paired bootstrap significance testing. Our results show that (1) a two-stage pipeline combining hybrid retrieval with neural reranking achieves Recall@5 of 0.816 and MRR@3 of 0.605, outperforming all single-stage methods by a large margin; (2) BM25 outperforms state-of-the-art dense retrieval on financial documents, challenging the common assumption that semantic search universally dominates; and (3) query expansion methods (HyDE, multi-query) and adaptive retrieval provide limited benefit for precise numerical queries, while contextual retrieval yields consistent gains. We provide ablation studies on fusion methods and reranker depth, actionable cost-accuracy recommendations, and release our full benchmark code.

Code2Doc: A Quality-First Curated Dataset for Code Documentation

The performance of automatic code documentation generation models depends critically on the quality of the training data used for supervision. However, most existing code documentation datasets are constructed through large scale scraping of public repositories with limited quality control. As a result, they often contain noisy documentation, extensive duplication, and increasing contamination from AI generated content. These issues weaken the supervision signal available to learning-based models and complicate evaluation. We introduce Code2Doc, a quality-first curated dataset for function-level code documentation generation. Code2Doc consists of 13,358 high-quality function-documentation pairs extracted from widely used open-source repositories spanning five programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, and C++. The dataset is constructed using a four-stage curation pipeline that enforces documentation completeness and clarity, filters functions based on structural and complexity criteria, removes exact and near-duplicate code, and identifies documentation likely to be AI generated. Starting from 52,069 extracted candidates, only 25.6% satisfy all quality constraints. We provide a detailed analysis of the resulting dataset, which achieves a mean documentation quality score of 6.93 out of 10. Overall, 86.9% of samples contain explicit type annotations, and only 2.9% are flagged as potentially AI generated. Baseline experiments show that fine-tuning a large language model on Code2Doc yields relative improvements of 29.47% in BLEU and 24.04% in ROUGE-L over zero shot performance, despite the modest dataset size. We release both the dataset and the full curation pipeline to support reproducible research on automatic code documentation generation.

Fine-Tuning Open Video Generators for Cinematic Scene Synthesis: A Small-Data Pipeline with LoRA and Wan2.1 I2V

We present a practical pipeline for fine-tuning open-source video diffusion transformers to synthesize cinematic scenes for television and film production from small datasets. The proposed two-stage process decouples visual style learning from motion generation. In the first stage, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules are integrated into the cross-attention layers of the Wan2.1 I2V-14B model to adapt its visual representations using a compact dataset of short clips from Ay Yapim's historical television film El Turco. This enables efficient domain transfer within hours on a single GPU. In the second stage, the fine-tuned model produces stylistically consistent keyframes that preserve costume, lighting, and color grading, which are then temporally expanded into coherent 720p sequences through the model's video decoder. We further apply lightweight parallelization and sequence partitioning strategies to accelerate inference without quality degradation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations using FVD, CLIP-SIM, and LPIPS metrics, supported by a small expert user study, demonstrate measurable improvements in cinematic fidelity and temporal stability over the base model. The complete training and inference pipeline is released to support reproducibility and adaptation across cinematic domains.