UMER is a Unified Multimodal Embedding and Ranking framework that combines contrastive embeddings with Pair‑Aware Discriminative Reasoning to improve universal multimodal retrieval. It replaces item‑wise reflection with pair‑wise comparison of query–candidate pairs, enabling explicit identification of matching and discrepancy evidence. A mutual distillation strategy transfers reliable pairwise preferences between the embedding and ranking components, and UMER achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the MMEB‑V2 benchmark while supporting budget‑adjustable inference.
By Libiao Chen, Xiyang Liu, Yanheng Wei, Tao Wang, Zhenyu Tang
arXiv:2607. 23052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dual-encoder vision-language models (VLMs) expose a similarity interface that enables zero-shot retrieval but fails compositional constraints: queries like "umbrella and no person" retrieve images containing both, even when concept detection is reliable.
By Sultan Alshehri, Zhantao Yang, Han Zhang, Marios Savvides
arXiv:2608. 14841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-document visual question answering (VQA) over documents of tens to hundreds of pages mixing text, tables, charts, and figures typically follows retrieve-then-read pipelines.
By Guanchen Wu, Jiayuan Ding, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Carl Yang
CORE improves compositional reasoning in multimodal language models by distilling a cross‑attentive reranker’s fine‑grained judgments into the embedding model. It generates candidate lists across five compositional matching levels and trains with a Rank‑KL objective to replicate the reranker’s ranking. Experiments on COLA, SUGARCREPE++, and NEGBENCH show CORE‑RERANKER‑8B outperforms Jina‑Reranker by 10.7 points, while CORE‑EMBED‑8B achieves the best overall average among evaluated embeddings, with gains also transferring to the MCMR benchmark without harming COCO or Flickr30K retrieval.
By Tingyu Song, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Chu Liu, Pengjun Xie, Yilun Zhao, Shu Wu
arXiv:2607. 22643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (mRAG) aims to answer image-text queries with external knowledge, but most existing systems still retrieve directly from raw multimodal input over a flat evidence space.
By Tianyu Yang, Shir Simon, Zhenzhen Li, Minhao Cheng, Xiangliang Zhang
arXiv:2607. 05438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds a generator in evidence drawn from heterogeneous modalities -- text, tables, and images.
By Xue Li, Yiming Gai
arXiv:2606. 20280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR).
By Yuhan Liu, Pei Fu, Hang Li, Yukun Qi, Chao Jiang, Jingwen Fu, Zhen Liu, Bin Qin, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Jingmin Xin
arXiv:2606. 31222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Composed image retrieval requires identifying a target image from a gallery by integrating a reference image with a textual modification instruction.
By Gunho Jung, Jeong-Woo Park, Seon Bin Kim, Seong-Whan Lee
arXiv:2608.29088v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal question answering remains sensitive to noisy, incomplete, and weakly grounded evidence. Long unstructured contexts can introduce redundancy...
By Zafar Ali, Asad Khan, Nimbeshaho Thierry, Nabila Amir, Adam A. Q. Mohammed, Pavlos Kefalas
arXiv:2607. 20517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over heterogeneous PDF collections remains challenging due to multimodal content, domain-specific terminology, and the need for multi-hop reasoning across dispersed evidence.
By Takato Yasuno
arXiv:2608. 12987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative information retrieval (GIR) has emerged as a compelling alternative to the conventional index-retrieve-then-rank retrieval pipeline by training a generator to produce the identifiers of relevant items directly.
By Kaipeng Li, Haitao Yu, Xuanchen Zhou
The paper introduces CERES, a closed‑loop multimodal indexing framework that addresses semantic collapse in multimodal generation by building a three‑level semantic pyramid and using scale‑routed cross‑attention to generate images that remain retrievable by their original queries. CERES employs a co‑occurrence‑aware router, a lightweight U‑Net generator, and a soft‑Jaccard coverage objective to ensure generated images cover the intended concepts, verified by re‑indexing with a frozen vision‑language model and an external DINOv2 probe. Experiments on four pansharpening benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, especially under extreme scale variation, and significant improvements in concept‑query retrieval and image‑text ranking metrics.
By Guangyuan Dong, Chuang Liu, Haoyu Wang, Yangchen Zeng, Jiaqi Zhang, Li Jiuxing, Xiaoyang Yu, Pinlong Zhao, Yuchao Hou, Ziwei Li, Zheng Lin, Alexander Lim Han Yang, Yusen Wu