multimodal rag

The instinct is to blame the vision encoder. It is a token-budget problem, and the fix is to retrieve pages before you look at them. What separates a strong answer is knowing which question types page retrieval quietly cannot answer.

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.