AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is multimodal retrieval?
Multimodal retrieval: Searching across different content types, such as text and images, by embedding them into a shared space so a text query can find images or the reverse. It powers image search and RAG over slides or scanned pages.
Multimodal retrieval: an example
A query 'red silk saree' returns product photos whose image embeddings are near the text embedding.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Nearest neighbour search
- nprobe
- Parent-document retrieval
- pgvector
- Post-filtering
- Pre-filtering
- Product quantisation
- Proposition indexing
Where you learn it
Multimodal retrieval is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.