Universal multimodal embeddings are becoming a core component of modern AI systems, enabling heterogeneous content to be represented in a shared space for applications such as retrieval, recommendatio...
arXiv:2609.37225v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for universal multimodal representation learning. However, existing methods eith...
By Zijing Cai, Yuzhe Wang, Jingxian Zhu, Fengbin Zhu, Richang Hong
arXiv:2606. 14747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advancements have significantly expanded the theoretical context windows of Multimodal Embedding Models (MEMs).
By Haitian Wang, Ruoxi Sun, Quantong Qiu, Juntao Li, Junhui Li, Hua Chen, Jinxiong Chang, Min Zhang
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
By Fan Xu, Luis A. Leiva
TokenSwap introduces a method to benchmark and reduce the modality gap in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by interleaving semantically aligned images with text tokens. By transforming text-only benchmarks like MMLU into image‑interleaved versions (TokenSwap‑Bench), the authors reveal a pervasive performance drop—averaging 19.6%—across 42 MLLMs, with reasoning models showing smaller gaps. Training with TokenSwap mitigates this gap while maintaining strong text‑only and vision‑language performance.
By Andong Hua, Colton Bishop, Igor Mordatch, Arian Hosseini, Jindong Gu, Aleksandra Faust, Rebecca Roelofs, Yao Qin
arXiv:2508. 16170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: MultiModal Recommendation (MMR) systems have emerged as a promising solution for improving recommendation quality by leveraging rich item-side modality information, prompting a surge of diverse methods.
By Xiaoxiong Zhang, Xin Zhou, Zhiwei Zeng, Yongjie Wang, Zhiqi Shen
arXiv:2607. 16305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong progress in multimodal understanding.
By Zeyu Xu, Xingzhong Hou, Pengkai Guo, Siling Lin, Xiao Xu, Menghua Zhai, Haoyu Chen, Yunke Zhang, Fei Huang
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
Current instruction-based image retrieval systems are powerful but limited to single-turn interactions, failing to capture the iterative nature of complex, real-world visual searches. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contextual Composed Image Retrieval (CoCo-IR), a novel task that enables users to progressively refine search results through interactions.
arXiv:2607. 29213v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommender systems in food delivery increasingly leverage multimodal signals, including images, text, and user interaction histories, to enhance user experience, yet effective fusion of these heterogeneous modalities remains challenging, hindering both the joint modeling of multimodal signals and adaptation to evolving user intent.
By Jiping Liu, Zhongmin Zhang, Zisen Sang, Zhijia Fang, Tao Ouyang, Ma Jiang, Shaopeng Liang, Zeyang Hou, Guodong Cao, Jia Jia
WeAgent-MMSearch introduces a multimodal search agent that preserves retrieved images as persistent references, enabling the model to inspect, process, and cite them throughout a search trajectory. The system includes a harness (WeAgent-Harness), a post‑training method (FA‑GSPO) that recovers salvageable rollouts, and a new benchmark (VisTarget‑Bench) to evaluate image‑retrieval versus visual‑perception failures. Evaluation shows that agentic post‑training boosts performance by 19.22 points, allowing the model to outperform similarly sized open‑source models and compete with much larger ones.
By Zongkai Liu, Hui Zhang, Liqiang Niu, Zhen Cao, Han Li, Juntao Liu, Wenchao Chen, Chengduo Zhao, Chao Yu, Fandong Meng
arXiv:2608. 11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval and classification across different types of media, spanning text, images,video and audio, has traditionally relied on dual-encoder models that align visual and textual representations through contrastive learning.
By Archan Dutta, Vyanktesh Kanungo