arXiv Computation and Language

Recurrence Meets Transformers for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

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.

arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

Autoregressive Retriever: Improving Query Understanding from Item Feedback for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

The paper introduces the AutoRegressive Retriever (ARR), a multimodal retrieval model that iteratively refines a query embedding by selecting informative items and incorporating their content. ARR alternates between retrieval and query update, using stepwise contrastive supervision and reinforcement learning to optimize item selection and final ranking. Experiments show ARR outperforms baselines on in‑domain and zero‑shot benchmarks, with feedback improving both inference performance and initial query embeddings.

By Jianfei Zhao, Yifan Wang, Feng Zhang, Xin Sun, Chong Feng, Zhixing Tan, Yang Luo, Boyuan Pan, Xu Kai, Yao Hu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 9

One Token per Multimodal Evidence: Latent Memory for Resource-Constrained QA

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.