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A RAG Approach for Multi-Modal Open-ended Lifelog Question-Answering

Tran, Quang-Linh orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-5409-0916, Ngo, Ngoc Diep Pham, Truong, Quoc Trung, Nguyen, Minh Hung, Le, Hong Cat, Vu, Dang Khoi, Nguyen, Van Minh Thien, Nguyen, Van Kinh, Nguyen, Luu Phuong Ngoc Lam, Le, Tan, Dang, Minh Phuc, Nguyen, Binh T., Jones, Gareth J.F. orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-2923-8365 and Gurrin, Cathal orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-2903-3968 (2025) A RAG Approach for Multi-Modal Open-ended Lifelog Question-Answering. In: The 15th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, 30 June - 03 July, 2025, Chicago, USA. ISBN 9798400718779

Abstract
Lifelogging is the passive collection, storage and analysis of daily data through wearable sensors. Question Answering (QA) for lifelog data enables natural language interactions with personal daily life records, providing insights into individual routines and behaviours. While this task has great potential for personal analytics and memory augmentation, progress has been limited due to the challenges of lifelog management, since they can comprise of enormous multi-modal data sets spanning a lifetime. We introduce a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach for addressing the lifelog QA task. A RAG approach first includes a retrieval model finding the correct lifelog events containing answers and then a large language model (LLM) generating answers from the questions. In addition, we construct an open-ended lifelog QA benchmark with 14,187 QA pairs to examine the RAG approach to lifelog QA. Using an embedding-based retrieval approach, our lifelog context retriever achieves a performance of 77.67% Recall@5 and 94.35% Recall@20 using an embedding-based retrieval approach with the Stella 1.5B model. Combined with the Mistral 7B model, the model achieves scores of 39.54% ROUGE-L and 3.475 Accuracy on a scale of 5 scored by GPT-4o. This approach potentially provides an effective approach to lifelog QA with high performance that does not require fine-tuning.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:large language models, lifelog question answering, multi-modal question answering dataset, retrieval-augmented generation
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
Computer Science > Information retrieval
Computer Science > Lifelog
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Research Institutes and Centres > ADAPT
Published in: Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval. . Association for Computing Machinery. ISBN 9798400718779
Publisher:Association for Computing Machinery
Official URL:https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3731715.3733263
Copyright Information:Authors
Funders:ADAPT
ID Code:31229
Deposited On:06 Oct 2026 13:44 by Quang-Linh Tran . Last Modified 06 Oct 2026 13:44
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