Multimodal RAG Enhanced Visual Description

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jaiswal, Amit Kumar, Liu, Haiming, Frommholz, Ingo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Jaiswal, Amit Kumar
Liu, Haiming
Frommholz, Ingo
author_facet Jaiswal, Amit Kumar
Liu, Haiming
Frommholz, Ingo
contents Textual descriptions for multimodal inputs entail recurrent refinement of queries to produce relevant output images. Despite efforts to address challenges such as scaling model size and data volume, the cost associated with pre-training and fine-tuning remains substantial. However, pre-trained large multimodal models (LMMs) encounter a modality gap, characterised by a misalignment between textual and visual representations within a common embedding space. Although fine-tuning can potentially mitigate this gap, it is typically expensive and impractical due to the requirement for extensive domain-driven data. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight training-free approach utilising Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extend across the modality using a linear mapping, which can be computed efficiently. During inference, this mapping is applied to images embedded by an LMM enabling retrieval of closest textual descriptions from the training set. These textual descriptions, in conjunction with an instruction, cater as an input prompt for the language model to generate new textual descriptions. In addition, we introduce an iterative technique for distilling the mapping by generating synthetic descriptions via the language model facilitating optimisation for standard utilised image description measures. Experimental results on two benchmark multimodal datasets demonstrate significant improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09170
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal RAG Enhanced Visual Description
Jaiswal, Amit Kumar
Liu, Haiming
Frommholz, Ingo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Information Retrieval
Textual descriptions for multimodal inputs entail recurrent refinement of queries to produce relevant output images. Despite efforts to address challenges such as scaling model size and data volume, the cost associated with pre-training and fine-tuning remains substantial. However, pre-trained large multimodal models (LMMs) encounter a modality gap, characterised by a misalignment between textual and visual representations within a common embedding space. Although fine-tuning can potentially mitigate this gap, it is typically expensive and impractical due to the requirement for extensive domain-driven data. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight training-free approach utilising Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extend across the modality using a linear mapping, which can be computed efficiently. During inference, this mapping is applied to images embedded by an LMM enabling retrieval of closest textual descriptions from the training set. These textual descriptions, in conjunction with an instruction, cater as an input prompt for the language model to generate new textual descriptions. In addition, we introduce an iterative technique for distilling the mapping by generating synthetic descriptions via the language model facilitating optimisation for standard utilised image description measures. Experimental results on two benchmark multimodal datasets demonstrate significant improvements.
title Multimodal RAG Enhanced Visual Description
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09170