arXiv Computer Vision

Query-Conditioned Spherical Centroid Aggregation for Multimodal Retrieval

The paper introduces SCALAR, a query‑conditioned spherical centroid aggregator that assigns relevance‑based weights to each available modality before computing a spherical centroid. SCALAR supports arbitrary modality subsets, is trained with rank‑8 LoRA adapters on masked views, and achieves positive aggregation gains on four of five benchmarks, outperforming prior symmetric aggregators. With only 4.8 million trainable parameters, SCALAR attains the highest text‑to‑video R@1 on three benchmarks and surpasses the released GRAM checkpoint under test‑time modality dropout by 3.2 to 10.9 R@1.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

OmniJudge or OmniBias? Diagnosing Multimodal Judges through Balanced, Decoupled Lenses

The paper introduces D3-Omni, a balanced and decoupled benchmark designed to diagnose fine‑grained multimodal understanding in OmniJudges that evaluate text‑to‑image, text‑to‑video, and text‑to‑speech generation. D3-Omni covers 53 orthogonal binary dimensions across 10,671 samples, using fixed positive seeds and controlled prompt rewriting to generate negatives, thereby ensuring each error can be attributed to a single capability. The benchmark’s dual‑balanced, decoupled, and dynamic design achieves near 1:1 per‑dimension parity and a uniform total‑score distribution, revealing that strong OmniJudges often miss modality‑related failures and treat distinct attributes as a single decision, masking systematic blind spots.

By Guangzheng Hu, Ziyue Jiang, Weixu Qiao, Lixin Zhang, Jianye Kang, Yuru Wu, Rong Bao, Niantong Li, Wei Wang, Ziyi Cheng, Xinfa Zhu, HangRui Hu, Ting He, Bing Zhao, Lin Qu, Hu Wei, Jin Xu
arXiv AI
1d ago

One Geometry, Different Outcomes: Readout-Dependent Effects of the Modality Gap in Vision-Language Models

The paper investigates how the modality gap— the separation between image and text representations in contrastive vision‑language models—affects different downstream tasks. By showing that a single dominant direction accounts for most of the image‑text mean separation, the authors explain why reducing or removing this gap can improve zero‑shot classification, degrade retrieval, or restore performance depending on the task. The study provides a geometric framework that clarifies when and why gap interventions should be applied in vision‑language systems.

By Aditya Sharma, Divya Saxena
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Graded-Relevance Composed Multimodal Retrieval for E-commerce Visual Search at Scale

The paper introduces GradCIR, a method for training composed image retrieval (CIR) systems on graded relevance rather than binary relevance. It uses a vision‑language model to generate queries and 4‑level relevance labels, an iterative feedback loop to mine hard negatives, and a hierarchy‑aware angular objective to directly optimize graded labels. Experiments on a Walmart catalog and FashionIQ show significant NDCG improvements and the system is deployed in Walmart’s live visual‑search traffic.

By Anubhav Gupta, Hrushikesh Mohapatra, Prijith Chandra, Asish Mohapatra, Anuj Garg, Arvind Maan, Sudip Datta, Venkat Bulusu, Sitesh Kumar Jalan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

MARS: What Retrieval Signals Are Hidden in Multimodal Large Language Models for Text-Video Retrieval?

MARS introduces a multi‑layer, multi‑slot embedding framework for text‑video retrieval that constructs adaptive representation slots by combining hidden states from different decoder layers. By comparing corresponding text and video slots and aggregating their similarities, MARS captures fine‑grained cues that single‑token embeddings miss. A hard‑negative‑aware slot specialization objective further encourages slots to focus on discriminative matching cues, leading to state‑of‑the‑art results on four benchmarks.

By Uicheol Jung, Juyoung Hong, Geuntaek Lim, Yukyung Choi