Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems combine the strengths of language generation and information retrieval to power many real-world applications like chatbots. Use of RAG for combined understanding of multimodal data such as text, images and videos is appealing but two critical limitations exist: one-time, upfront capture of all content in large multimodal data as text descriptions entails high processing times, and not all information in the rich multimodal data is typically in the text descriptions. Since the user queries are not known apriori, developing a system for multimodal to text conversion and interactive querying of multimodal data is challenging. To address these limitations, we propose iRAG, which augments RAG with a novel incremental workflow to enable interactive querying of large corpus of multimodal data. Unlike traditional RAG, iRAG quickly indexes large repositories of multimodal data, and in the incremental workflow, it uses the index to opportunistically extract more details from select portions of the multimodal data to retrieve context relevant to an interactive user query. Such an incremental workflow avoids long multimodal to text conversion times, overcomes information loss issues by doing on-demand query-specific extraction of details in multimodal data, and ensures high quality of responses to interactive user queries that are often not known apriori. To the best of our knowledge, iRAG is the first system to augment RAG with an incremental workflow to support efficient interactive querying of large, real-world multimodal data. Experimental results on real-world long videos demonstrate 23x to 25x faster video to text ingestion, while ensuring that quality of responses to interactive user queries is comparable to responses from a traditional RAG where all video data is converted to text upfront before any querying.

通过增量流程的方式，iRAG提供对大规模、真实世界的多模态数据的高效交互式查询，比传统的RAG系统更快地将视频转换为文本，并确保与传统RAG相比，响应交互用户查询的质量相当。

iRAG：一种用于视频的增量检索增强生成系统