Dice Question Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Trustworthiness Mechanisms for Multimedia QA

Develop reliable trustworthiness mechanisms for multimedia question answering that provide explicit modality-level attribution and segment-level citations to the retrieved evidence supporting generated answers.

Information Square Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Background

Retrieval-augmented QA systems for multimedia content must justify answers with verifiable evidence drawn from text, images, audio, or video segments. The paper identifies the absence of robust attribution and citation capabilities as a key unresolved issue, highlighting the need for mechanisms that trace outputs back to specific modalities and temporal segments to improve transparency, verifiability, and user trust.

References

Despite recent progress, several challenges remain unresolved. Key issues include the difficulty of finegrained multimodal alignment (e.g., syncing spoken language with visual scenes), the lack of robust trustworthiness mechanisms such as modality attribution or segment-level citations, and the computational overhead introduced by real time or large scale retrieval. Further complexities arise in handling multilingual queries and supporting low-resource modalities, along with the persistent challenge of evaluating answer quality across modalities.

— Multimedia-Aware Question Answering: A Review of Retrieval and Cross-Modal Reasoning Architectures (2510.20193 - Raja et al., 23 Oct 2025) in Conclusion (Section 5)