L\"etzCross: A Cross-Lingual Page-Level Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval over Luxembourgish Documents

arXiv:2608.21714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent page-image retrievers such as ColPali have improved retrieval over visually rich documents, yet little is known about how they behave in cross-lingual, low-resource settings. We introduce L"etzCross, a benchmark for cross-lingual page-level retrieval over Luxembourgish PDF documents, with document pages indexed as images and queries provided in English, French, German, and Luxembourgish. The benchmark combines text-focused QA pairs with visually grounded QA pairs, covering both textual and visual retrieval needs in PDF-based RAG. We use L"etzCross to compare OCR-based text-only retrievers with ColPali-style page-image retrievers and find that the latter perform better across query languages in this system-level comparison. We also examine single-language and multilingual fine-tuning. Fine-tuning transfers across query languages, with French yielding the highest mean performance on Luxembourgish queries among the single-language settings. In the multilingual setting, including Luxembourgish gives the strongest results and substantially improves retrieval for Luxembourgish queries.