Retrieval, RAG & Search

Executive summary Short: A 2026 benchmark on a 5,000-item apparel & footwear catalog found that a simple average of image and text embeddings (L2-normalize each, mean, then L2-normalize) produced substantially better product search results than image-only or text-only retrieval—up to ~1.5× improvement on top-of-list metrics (Recall@1/5/10, MRR, nDCG@10). The study also showed multimodal averaging improved…