# Multimedia-Aware Question Answering: A Review of Retrieval and Cross-Modal Reasoning Architectures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20193 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20193/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 49 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07042/) (2018)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07899/) (2021)
- [VATT: Transformers for Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning from Raw Video, Audio and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11178/) (2021)
- [Unified-IO: A Unified Model for Vision, Language, and Multi-Modal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08916/) (2022)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Question Answering (QA) systems have traditionally relied on structured text data, but the rapid growth of multimedia content (images, audio, video, and structured metadata) has introduced new challenges and opportunities for retrieval-augmented QA. In this survey, we review recent advancements in QA systems that integrate multimedia retrieval pipelines, focusing on architectures that align vision, language, and audio modalities with user queries. We categorize approaches based on retrieval methods, fusion techniques, and answer generation strategies, and analyze benchmark datasets, evaluation protocols, and performance tradeoffs. Furthermore, we highlight key challenges such as cross-modal alignment, latency-accuracy tradeoffs, and semantic grounding, and outline open problems and future research directions for building more robust and context-aware QA systems leveraging multimedia data.