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
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
AdaKerNet is a task‑adaptive neural kernel decoder that operates on frozen multimodal representations from large foundation models, without requiring access to the models’ parameters. It learns Lipschitz‑controlled multimodal features, a reference kernel providing a soft structural prior, and a lightweight nonlinear predictor that deforms this structure. Experiments on four multimodal large language models and diverse input modalities show consistent improvements over baseline decoders, achieving up to 41% error reduction in scarce‑label settings.
By Konstantinos D. Polyzos, Eleni Oikonomou, Tara Javidi
arXiv:2607. 25266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled long-form video understanding at a scale that was not previously possible.
By Ghazal Kaviani, Ghassan AlRegib
arXiv:2608. 07663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When videos extend from hours to days, directly processing them end-to-end becomes impractical for current Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs).
By Yeeun Choi, Youngbeom Yoo, Joon-Young Lee, Hyolim Kang, Seon Joo Kim
ReVisIT is a train‑free framework that turns retrieved image‑label pairs into units of visual thought, combining structured class definitions, multimodal retrieval, and alternating user/assistant injection before joint decoding. On several benchmarks—including Fast Open MiniImageNet, Bongard‑OpenWorld, and the newly released MAAC‑Bench—ReVisIT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing large, trained models while using far fewer parameters. The approach demonstrates that high‑quality retrieval and a simple turns layer can provide a universal performance boost across diverse multimodal tasks.
By Bingchen Huang, Zhiling Wang, Yifu Chen, Yuanchao Du
We introduce Predictive State Retrieval (PSR), a task in which a model observes a short video prefix and a temporal question about an object's future state, then retrieves instances from other videos or images that depict that state. Unlike action anticipation, which predicts a label, moment retrieval, which localizes an observed event within a video, or video generation, which synthesizes pixels, PSR combines anticipation with cross-instance retrieval across multiple temporal horizons.
The paper introduces iAmTime, a time‑series foundation model that uses instruction‑conditioned in‑context learning to adapt to tasks at inference time. iAmTime represents each episode as a structured prompt with semantic tokens that focus on specific time‑series regions, enabling the model to infer task structure from input‑output demonstrations. Trained on large real and synthetic corpora across forecasting, imputation, reconstruction, classification, anomaly detection, and source de‑mixing, iAmTime outperforms strong baselines on zero‑shot probabilistic and point forecasting while matching or exceeding performance on several non‑forecasting tasks.
By Anish Saha, Konstantin Shmakov
arXiv:2606. 10572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: External memory effectively grounds large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs)-based question answering (QA) in relevant multimodal evidence.
By Zhi Zheng, Ziqiao Meng, Hao Luan, Wei Liu, Wee Sun Lee
arXiv:2606. 15134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched.
By Shubhang Bhatnagar, Dheeraj Baiju, Narendra Ahuja
External memory effectively grounds large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs)-based question answering (QA) in relevant multimodal evidence. However, existing memory paradigms represent each memory item in raw text and image forms, so retrieval-based systems must pass the retrieved text or images to the generation LLMs/VLMs, resulting in high token consumption and storage pressure, making it unaffordable for resource-constrained applications.
The paper introduces SIMPLE, a prior‑fitted multi‑view in‑context learner that learns a reusable, task‑conditioned inference procedure instead of a fixed fusion function. By generating synthetic task priors in embedding space, SIMPLE can handle diverse view configurations, class structures, and missingness patterns. Experiments on multi‑view and multi‑omics benchmarks show that a frozen SIMPLE model performs competitively, and lightweight adapter calibration further improves performance across most datasets.
By Jielong Lu, Zhihao Wu, Jiajun Yu, Zhaoliang Chen, Haishuai Wang