aiqbench analysis
HIRA introduces a training-free, on-premises framework that optimizes document classification in regulated sectors by intelligently routing uncertain cases to local LLM verifiers and human reviewers. By leveraging retrieval-augmented memory and confusion graphs, the system significantly reduces reliance on costly model retraining while maintaining high accuracy with minimal human intervention. This approach offers a practical pathway for deploying robust AI governance in environments where data residency and limited labeling resources are critical constraints.
HIRA: A Human-in-the-Loop Retrieval-Augmented Cascade for Document Classification in Regulated Industries
arXiv:2608.21792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Document classification in regulated industries is constrained by data residency, limited cold-start labels, scarce review capacity, and costly model-governance procedures. We present HIRA, a training-free, on-premises retrieval-augmented cascade for document classification in regulated deployments that combines BM25 over OCR text, dense text embeddings, and image-level representations through validation-calibrated weighted reciprocal-rank fusion. Confident documents are classified directly by retrieval; uncertain or visually confusable documents are passed to a locally hosted LLM verifier, which receives the OCR text, retrieved exemplars, label descriptions, and confusion-specific terms. When the verifier remains uncertain, the document is sent to human review. Each correction is stored as a margin-weighted retrieval exemplar and updates a Dirichlet-smoothed confusion graph, letting the system improve without updating model weights. On a private 80-class trade-finance corpus, HIRA processes the full 30,233-document production stream while requesting human correction for only 1,945 documents (6.4%), improving Macro-F1 from 0.6218 to 0.8548. On the corrected Tobacco-3482 benchmark, HIRA reaches 0.9423 Macro-F1 with a locally hosted DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B verifier, 17.4 percentage points above the zero-shot LLM baseline, while invoking the verifier for only about 40% of documents and reducing LLM calls by approximately 60%. With 518 human corrections (24.8% of the pool), HIRA matches the fully labelled pool oracle, in which all 2,086 pool documents are indexed with their ground-truth labels. These results show that selective human feedback and retrieval-memory adaptation can be a practical alternative to repeated model retraining for long-tail document classification in regulated deployments.
Abstract:Document classification in regulated industries is constrained by data residency, limited cold-start labels, scarce review capacity, and costly model-governance procedures. We present HIRA, a training-free, on-premises retrieval-augmented cascade for document classification in regulated deployments that combines BM25 over OCR text, dense text embeddings, and image-level representations through validation-calibrated weighted reciprocal-rank fusion. Confident documents are classified directly by retrieval; uncertain or visually confusable documents are passed to a locally hosted LLM verifier, which receives the OCR text, retrieved exemplars, label descriptions, and confusion-specific terms. When the verifier remains uncertain, the document is sent to human review. Each correction is stored as a margin-weighted retrieval exemplar and updates a Dirichlet-smoothed confusion graph, letting the system improve without updating model weights. On a private 80-class trade-finance corpus, HIRA processes the full 30,233-document production stream while requesting human correction for only 1,945 documents (6.4%), improving Macro-F1 from 0.6218 to 0.8548. On the corrected Tobacco-3482 benchmark, HIRA reaches 0.9423 Macro-F1 with a locally hosted DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B verifier, 17.4 percentage points above the zero-shot LLM baseline, while invoking the verifier for only about 40% of documents and reducing LLM calls by approximately 60%. With 518 human corrections (24.8% of the pool), HIRA matches the fully labelled pool oracle, in which all 2,086 pool documents are indexed with their ground-truth labels. These results show that selective human feedback and retrieval-memory adaptation can be a practical alternative to repeated model retraining for long-tail document classification in regulated deployments.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.21792 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2608.21792v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.21792 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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