What is Multimodal RAG?
TL;DR
An evolution of RAG that retrieves and understands not just text but also images, tables, and charts to generate answers.
Multimodal RAG: Definition & Explanation
Multimodal RAG (Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation) extends traditional text-based RAG by integrating multiple modalities — including images, tables, charts, diagrams, and PDF layouts — as retrieval targets for comprehensive understanding and response generation. For example, it can explain repair procedures while referencing technical manual diagrams, or perform analysis based on chart data in financial reports. This is achieved by using multimodal embedding models such as CLIP and SigLIP to embed both images and text into the same vector space. It is gaining attention for enterprise document management and customer support applications.