Knowledge Share

RAG Series (23): Multimodal RAG — Images and Tables Can Be Retrieved Too

Part 23 of the RAG series. 30–50% of the information in real documents lives in images and tables — invisible to text-only RAG. Three approaches: extract and textualize (most mature), CLIP multimodal embeddings (text and images in the same vector space), ColPali (process each PDF page as an image directly, bypassing text extraction entirely — the 2024 breakthrough). When to use each, and a practical decision guide.