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:2606.13061v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reasoning-driven universal multimodal embedding has advanced rapidly by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the embedding pipeline. D...
By Peixi Wu, Biao Yang, Feipeng Ma, Bosong Chai, Bo Lin, Wei Yuan, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Hebei Li, Xiaoyan Sun
arXiv:2604.22280v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a promising foundation for universal multimodal embeddings. Recent studies have shown that...
By Peixi Wu, Ke Mei, Feipeng Ma, Bosong Chai, Zhibin Lan, Chenxi Zhao, Shannan Yan, Jie Chen, Zhangchi Hu, Yansong Peng, Bo Lin, Junjie Zhou, Dacheng Yin, Tianyi Wang, Fengyun Rao, Jing Lyu, Hebei Li, Xiaoyan Sun
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:2609.05518v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Despite the strong capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their parametric knowledge remains incomplete and difficult to update, m...
By Jiacheng Cai, Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Huachi Zhou, Qinggang Zhang, Xiao Huang
MMEmb-R1 is a multimodal embedding framework that enhances reasoning by treating it as a latent variable and selecting beneficial reasoning paths through pair-aware selection and counterfactual intervention. It uses reinforcement learning to invoke reasoning only when necessary, reducing unnecessary computation and latency. On the MMEB-V2 benchmark, MMEmb-R1 achieves a state‑of‑the‑art score of 71.2 with just 4 B parameters.
By Yuchi Wang, Dingkang Yang, Haiyang Yu, Weikang Bian, Jiefeng Long, Xiao Liang, Chao Feng, Hongsheng Li
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.
By Tao Zhang, Ziqi Zhang, Zongyang Ma, Yuxin Chen, Zhongang Qi, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Junfu Pu, Yuxuan Zhao, Zehua Xie, Jin Ma, Ying Shan, Weiming Hu
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.
By Zafar Ali, Asad Khan, Aalia Malik, Pavlos Kefalas
The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.
By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yixian Chen, Ruizhi Chen, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong
arXiv:2609.21675v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Despite the remarkable progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), prevailing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigms remain confined to the natural...
By Wan Xu, Yuanfan Guo, Kevin Han, LaLa Chen, Wangmeng Zuo
arXiv:2607. 14682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient multimodal document question answering with explicit visual grounding, locating the precise document region that supports each answer remains an open challenge.
By Harikrishnan P M, Goutham Vignesh, Ganesh Parab, Saisubramaniam Gopalakrishnan, Vishal Vaddina, Varun V, Rohit Agrawal
arXiv:2608. 14107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning-intensive retrieval requires text representations to capture not only semantic similarity, but also the reasoning needed to determine relevance under a given retrieval instruction.
By Gang Zhou, Xiongxi Yu, Hu Tian, Yang Wei, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng, Shibiao Xu, Xiaolong Zheng