PRISM-RAG: Multimodal Hypergraph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Tobacco Product and Legislative Policy Reasoning

Manuel Serna-Aguilera, Raegan Anderes, Page Dobbs, Khoa Luu

The disambiguation of semantically similar statutory text across jurisdictions is a retrieval problem that existing methods do not solve. This inter-context conflict can steer generative models toward confidently produced answers grounded in topically relevant but jurisdictionally incorrect sources. Tobacco and nicotine regulations vary by US jurisdiction, often sharing similar language, thus, robust reasoning requires identifying which jurisdiction's law governs a given product, not merely retrieving relevant text. Emerging products (e.g., pouches) exploit ambiguous definitions to evade regulation. State-of-the-art (SOTA) document retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods struggle to address this inter-context conflict, and thus struggle to connect image attributes (e.g., rich attribute captions) to the set of similar legislation texts. We introduce NicoPRISM (Nicotine Product and Regulation Image-and-Text Surveillance Multimodal), comprising 161,563 images, attribute captions, a knowledge base of product, health, and legislative documents spanning 13 US jurisdictions, and 1,495 validated question-answer pairs across two tasks: policy compliance QA and product knowledge QA.…