RiverEcho-2.0: A Real-Time Interactive System for Yellow River Culture via Enhanced MultiModal Document RAG

The Yellow River culture is a cornerstone of Chinese civilization, embodying rich historical, social, and ecological significance. To conserve and promote this invaluable cultural heritage, we propose RiverEcho-2.0, a real-time interactive digital system designed to facilitate user engagement with Yellow River culture. As the foundation of our system, we curated and digitized a comprehensive collection of books and documents related to Yellow River heritage, constructing a dedicated multimodal corpus. To effectively leverage this corpus, we introduce a novel multi-modal Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework that enhances document retrieval through context-aware image-text alignment and joint embedding. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a large improvement over existing state-of-the-art multi-modal RAG baselines, leading to significant gains in downstream tasks.