Multimodal RAG Architecture

Use this skill when a knowledge base contains more than plain text. Treat images, tables, equations, layout, captions, and cross-page structure as first-class evidence instead of stripping everything into text chunks.

When Text-Only RAG Fails

Switch to multimodal RAG when:

• Important answers live in tables, charts, screenshots, diagrams, figures, or equations
• PDFs have layout-dependent meaning such as forms, invoices, manuals, or scientific papers
• The same concept appears across text, image, and table regions
• Long documents cause retrieval to miss sparse visual evidence
• Users ask for answers that require comparing visual and textual context

Architecture