An Intelligent Docent System with a Small Large Language Model (sLLM) Based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

This study designed and empirically evaluated a method to enhance information accessibility for museum and art gallery visitors using a small Large Language Model (sLLM) based on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework. Over 199,000 exhibition descriptions were collected and refined, and a question-answering dataset consisting of 102,000 pairs reflecting user personas was constructed to develop DocentGemma, a domain-optimized language model. This model was fine-tuned through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) based on Google’s Gemma2-9B and integrated with FAISS and OpenSearch-based document retrieval systems within the LangChain framework. Performance evaluation was conducted using a dedicated Q&A benchmark for the docent domain, comparing the model against five commercial and open-source LLMs (including GPT-3.5 Turbo, LLaMA3.3-70B, and Gemma2-9B). DocentGemma achieved an accuracy of 85.55% and a perplexity of 3.78, demonstrating competitive performance in language generation and response accuracy within the domain-specific context. To enhance retrieval relevance, a Spatio-Contextual Retriever (SC-Retriever) was introduced, which combines semantic similarity and spatial proximity based on the user’s query and location. An ablation study confirmed that integrating both modalities improved retrieval quality, with the SC-Retriever achieving a recall@1 of 53.45% and a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 68.12, representing a 17.5 20% gain in search accuracy compared to baseline models such as GTE and SpatialNN. System performance was further validated through field deployment at three major exhibition venues in Seoul (the Seoul History Museum, the Hwan-ki Museum, and the Hanseong Baekje Museum). A user test involving 110 participants indicated high response credibility and an average satisfaction score of 4.24. To ensure accessibility, the system supports various output formats, including multilingual speech and subtitles. This work illustrates a practical application of integrating LLM-based conversational capabilities into traditional docent services and suggests potential for further development toward location-aware interactive systems and AI-driven cultural content services.