arXiv AI
Jun 30
Multimodal Representation Alignment for Cross-modal Information Retrieval
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
Evaluating Perspectival Biases in Cross-Modal Retrieval
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arXiv AI
Jul 24
MELLA: Bridging Linguistic Capability and Cultural Groundedness for Low-Resource Language MLLMs
arXiv:2508. 05502v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform strongly in high-resource languages, yet often produce fluent but culturally "thin" descriptions in low-resource settings.
arXiv AI
Jul 20
Debiasing Text-to-Image Evaluation via Implicit Cultural Alignment Reward Modeling
arXiv:2607. 15740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Text-to-Image (T2I) systems rapidly advance, evaluating the cultural authenticity of synthesized content has become increasingly important for fair and trustworthy generative AI.
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28
Many Dialects, Many Languages, One Cultural Lens: Evaluating Multilingual VLMs for Bengali Culture Understanding Across Historically Linked Languages and Regional Dialects
BanglaVerse is a new benchmark that evaluates multilingual vision‑language models on Bengali culture, covering nine visual domains and expanding to four languages and five Bangla dialects for a total of about 32,200 artifacts. It includes visual question answering and captioning tasks built from 1,152 manually curated images. Experiments show that models perform worse on dialectal variants and that missing cultural knowledge, rather than visual grounding, is the main bottleneck.
arXiv AI
Aug 28
MIMO: Multilingual Information Retrieval via Monolingual Objectives
MIMO: Multilingual Information Retrieval via Monolingual Objectives proposes a two‑stage framework that first aligns a student model to a stable English semantic space using knowledge distillation, then jointly optimizes distillation and cross‑lingual contrastive learning to improve retrieval discrimination while preserving alignment. The approach addresses language clustering and the trade‑off between cross‑lingual alignment and embedding uniformity, outperforming existing cross‑lingual training baselines on both multilingual and multi‑monolingual benchmarks. MIMO also remains competitive with larger off‑the‑shelf models and its alignment‑uniformity analysis clarifies the distinct roles of the two loss components. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates a practical method to enhance multilingual information retrieval performance by balancing alignment and uniformity, which is crucial for real‑world search environments where queries and documents span multiple languages."
arXiv AI
Aug 13
Can Frontier LLMs Match Natively Multimodal Embeddings? A Comparison on Hard-Negative Text-to-Image Retrieval
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.
arXiv AI
Jun 19
ELVA: Exploring Ranking-Driven Universal Multimodal Retrieval
arXiv:2606. 20280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR).
arXiv AI
Aug 12
On the Limitations of Cross-Lingual Consistency in Multilingual Text-to-image Generation
arXiv:2608. 11002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years.
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25
PUMA: A Polish Benchmark for Culturally Grounded Multimodal Understanding
arXiv:2608.21853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly moving beyond text processing, adding support for other modalities such as images and audio. While text understa...
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27
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 AI
Aug 14
Generative Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Dual-role Identifiers
arXiv:2608. 12987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative information retrieval (GIR) has emerged as a compelling alternative to the conventional index-retrieve-then-rank retrieval pipeline by training a generator to produce the identifiers of relevant items directly.
arXiv AI
Jun 26
MKG-RAG-Bench: Benchmarking Retrieval in Multimodal Knowledge Graph-Augmented Generation
arXiv:2606. 26458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over knowledge graphs has emerged as a promising approach for grounding large language models, yet existing benchmarks largely overlook the challenges of retrieval in multimodal knowledge graph RAG (MKG-RAG).