Intermediate1h23m

Building Multimodal Search and RAG

Instructor: Sebastian Witalec

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Earn an accomplishment with PRO · Updated May 15, 2026

  • Intermediate
  • 1h23m
  • 8 Video Lessons
  • 6 Code Examples
  • Earn an accomplishment with PRO
  • Updated May 15, 2026
  • Instructor: Sebastian Witalec
  • WeaviateWeaviate
  • Learn more aboutMembership PRO Plan

What you'll learn

  • Learn how multimodality works by implementing contrastive learning, and see how it can be used to build modality-independent embeddings for seamless any-to-any retrieval.

  • Build multimodal RAG systems that retrieve multimodal context and reason over it to generate more relevant answers.

  • Implement industry applications of multimodal search and build multi-vector recommender systems.

Course recap

PRO

This course teaches how to build multimodal search systems and RAG applications that work across text, images, and video. It covers how shared multimodal embedding spaces allow cross-modal retrieval (text-to-image, image-to-video, etc.), how large multimodal models (LMMs) reason over visual content through visual instruction tuning, and how to combine these capabilities into multimodal RAG pipelines.

Concept map

Concepts in Building Multimodal Search and RAG and the courses that connect to themBuilding Multimodal Search and RAGBuilding Multimodal Searc…EmbeddingsRetrieval-Augmented GenerationRetrieval-Augmented Gener…Visual instruction tuningShared embedding spaceLarge multimodal models (LMMs)Large multimodal models (…Building and Evaluating Advanced RAGBuilding and Evaluating A…Building with Llama 4Advanced Retrieval for AIAI Code ReviewAgent Memory: Building Memory-Aware AgentsAgent Memory: Building Me…Concepts in Building Multimodal Search and RAG and the courses that connect to themBuilding Multimodal Search and RAGBuilding Multim…EmbeddingsRetrieval-Augmented GenerationRetrieval-Augme…Visual instruction tuningVisual instruct…Shared embedding spaceShared embeddin…Large multimodal models (LMMs)Large multimoda…

Key concepts

  • EmbeddingsMultimodal vector embeddings that place similar data points close together regardless of modality (text, image, video)
  • Retrieval-Augmented GenerationExtended to multimodal contexts where retrieved content can be images or video alongside text
  • Visual instruction tuningTraining LLMs to process images alongside text by embedding image patches and text tokens together
  • Shared embedding spaceUnified vector space where semantically similar content clusters together across modalities
  • Large multimodal models (LMMs)Models like Gemini Pro Vision that can reason over images and text simultaneously

About this course

⚠️ This course is currently under maintenance due to a technical issue with notebooks. We’re working to resolve this as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

Learn how to build multimodal search and RAG systems. RAG systems enhance an LLM by incorporating proprietary data into the prompt context. Typically, RAG applications use text documents, but, what if the desired context includes multimedia like images, audio, and video? This course covers the technical aspects of implementing RAG with multimodal data to accomplish this.

  • Learn how multimodal models are trained through contrastive learning and implement it on a real dataset.
  • Build any-to-any multimodal search to retrieve relevant context across different data types.
  • Learn how LLMs are trained to understand multimodal data through visual instruction tuning and use them on multiple image reasoning examples
  • Implement an end-to-end multimodal RAG system that analyzes retrieved multimodal context to generate insightful answers
  • Explore industry applications like visually analyzing invoices and flowcharts to output structured data.
  • Create a multi-vector recommender system that suggests relevant items by comparing their similarities across multiple modalities.

As AI systems increasingly need to process and reason over multiple data modalities, learning how to build such systems is an important skill for AI developers.

This course equips you with the key skills to embed, retrieve, and generate across different modalities. By gaining a strong foundation in multimodal AI, you’ll be prepared to build smarter search, RAG, and recommender systems.

Who should join?

This course is for anyone who wants to start building their own multimodal applications. Basic Python knowledge, as well as familiarity with RAG is recommended to get the most out of this course.

Course Outline

8 Lessons・6 Code Examples
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Instructor

Sebastian Witalec

Sebastian Witalec

Head of Developer Relations at Weaviate

Course access is free for a limited time during the DeepLearning.AI learning platform beta!

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