What is multimodal RAG, and how does it differ from text-only RAG?
Real documents carry images, charts, and tables, not only text, and text-only RAG quietly drops them. The signal is knowing the two retrieval approaches and why the generator has to change too. Here is the answer.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Real documents carry images, charts, and tables, not only text, and text-only RAG quietly drops them. The signal is knowing the two retrieval approaches and why the generator has to change too. Here is the answer.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
