The paper introduces ReT-2, a unified retrieval model that handles multimodal queries containing both images and text and searches across multimodal document collections. It employs a recurrent Transformer architecture with LSTM-inspired gating to integrate information across layers and modalities, capturing fine-grained visual and textual details. Evaluations on M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, faster inference, and lower memory usage, and the model also boosts downstream tasks in retrieval‑augmented generation pipelines.
By Davide Caffagni, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
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
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. 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:2505.13520v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Textbook question answering (TQA) is a complex task, requiring the interpretation of complex multimodal context. Although recent advances hav...
By Hessa Alawwad, Usman Naseem, Areej Alhothali, Ali Alkhathlan, Amani Jamal
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. 26458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over knowledge graphs has emerged as a promising approach for grounding large language models, yet existing benchmarks largely overlook the challenges of retrieval in multimodal knowledge graph RAG (MKG-RAG).
By Xiaochen Wang, Bao Hoang, Han Liu, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma
The paper introduces SRAIN, a framework that learns sample‑wise, rank‑aware interpolation weights for composed visual data retrieval. Instead of relying on complex multimodal large language models, SRAIN uses simple linear interpolation in embedding space, dynamically predicting query‑specific weights through batch‑wise rank‑aware estimation and a compact memory bank for hard negatives. This approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on composed video retrieval and competitive results on composed image retrieval while significantly reducing query‑time latency.
By Boseung Jeong, Taegyu Park, Donghyeon Kwon, Hyunsouk Cho, Suha Kwak
arXiv:2610.11228v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for sequential recommendation through their ability to reason over complex...
By Jason Marcell Setiadi, Xin Cao, Lina Yao
arXiv:2610.13277v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Memory-augmented assistants retrieve evidence from stored conversations and documents to answer queries. Most embedding-based retrievers compare sing...
By Han Luo, Zhan Zhuang, Xu He, Jujia Zhao, Yu Li, Suqin Yuan, Dong Li, Lei Feng
arXiv:2609.15296v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Universal multimodal embedding (UME) learns unified representations across modalities, enabling a single model to support diverse retrieval tasks. Rece...
By Mingzhou Jiang, Peixi Wu, Hang Cheng, Yunhao Zhou, Biao Yang, Wei Yuan, Yun Li, Fan Yang, Wenwu Ou, Honghui He
Prompted embedding models have recently received increasing attention, particularly for retrieval, where detailed retrieval instructions are provided as part of the retrieval prompt. Several new datas...