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.
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).
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.
arXiv:2411. 15041v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with recent Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, such as INFOSEEK and Encyclopedic-VQA, due to their limited and frozen knowledge scope, often leading to ambiguous and inaccurate responses.
arXiv:2608. 14584v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Multimodal Question Answering (MQA), models are required to jointly encode and integrate heterogeneous information from multiple modalities, including text, images, and speech, to perform complex semantic reasoning and decision making.
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
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).
arXiv:2604. 04969v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing systems struggle with complex cross-modal reasoning.
arXiv:2608. 15056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems often rely on long unstructured contexts or aggressively expanded evidence graphs, which can introduce noisy evidence, weaken multi-hop reasoning, and increase unsupported generation.
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.
arXiv:2607. 16305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong progress in multimodal understanding.
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.
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.