# AIC CTU@AVerImaTeC: dual-retriever RAG for image-text fact checking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15190 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15190/

## 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 9 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- [Missing Counter-Evidence Renders NLP Fact-Checking Unrealistic for Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13865/) (2022)
- [The Automated Verification of Textual Claims (AVeriTeC) Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23850/) (2024)
- [Ev2R: Evaluating Evidence Retrieval in Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05375/) (2024)
- [AVerImaTeC: A Dataset for Automatic Verification of Image-Text Claims with Evidence from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17978/) (2025)
- [AIC CTU system at AVeriTeC: Re-framing automated fact-checking as a simple RAG task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11446/) (2024)
- [AIC CTU@FEVER 8: On-premise fact checking through long context RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04390/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present our 3rd place system in the AVerImaTeC shared task, which combines our last year's retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline with a reverse image search (RIS) module. Despite its simplicity, our system delivers competitive performance with a single multimodal LLM call per fact-check at just 0.013 on average using GPT5.1 via OpenAI Batch API. Our system is also easy to reproduce and tweak, consisting of only three decoupled modules - a textual retrieval module based on similarity search, an image retrieval module based on API-accessed RIS, and a generation module using GPT5.1 - which is why we suggest it as an accesible starting point for further experimentation. We publish its code and prompts, as well as our vector stores and insights into the scheme's running costs and directions for further improvement.