arXiv AI

VLM2Rec: Resolving Modality Collapse in Vision-Language Model Embedders for Multimodal Sequential Recommendation

arXiv:2603. 17450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequential Recommendation (SR) in multimodal settings typically relies on small frozen pretrained encoders, which limits semantic capacity and prevents Collaborative Filtering (CF) signals from being fully integrated into item representations.

arXiv AI
Jun 8

Modality Gap-Driven Subspace Alignment Training Paradigm For Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2602. 07026v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in aligning visual and linguistic representations, a persistent geometric anomaly, the Modality Gap, remains: embeddings of distinct modalities expressing identical semantics occupy systematically offset regions.

By Xiaomin Yu, Yi Xin, Yuhui Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, Chonghan Liu, Hanzhen Zhao, Chen Liu, Xiaoxing Hu, Ziyue Qiao, Hao Tang, Xiaobin Hu, Chengwei Qin, Hui Xiong, Yu Qiao, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Latent-Aligned Reasoning for Multimodal Recommendation

The paper introduces LARK, a two‑stage latent reasoning framework designed to mitigate cross‑modal dilution in multimodal recommendation systems. In the first stage, learnable latent tokens are interleaved with chain‑of‑thought reasoning and aligned with a frozen vision encoder to preserve visual details. The second stage projects these latent representations through a bridge MLP, employing item‑to‑item contrastive learning and aligning intermediate features with the first‑stage hidden states to anchor final embeddings to the model’s reasoning output. Experiments on three public benchmarks and an industrial dataset demonstrate that LARK achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance across multiple recommendation architectures, with ablation studies confirming the contribution of each component.

By Jiarui Jin, Anyang Ji
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Reconstructing Content via Collaborative Attention to Improve Multimodal Embedding Quality

arXiv:2603. 01471v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal embedding models, rooted in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), have yielded significant performance improvements across diverse tasks such as retrieval and classification.

By Jiahan Chen, Da Li, Hengran Zhang, Yinqiong Cai, Lixin Su, Jiafeng Guo, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Keping Bi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

MURAL: Multimodal Uncertainty-aware Recommendation via Adaptive edge Learning

MURAL is a multimodal recommendation framework that replaces static similarity graphs with a dynamic topology discovery process. It uses an Adaptive Edge Learner to find latent item-item correlations efficiently and an Uncertainty-Aware Fusion module to down‑weight noisy modality signals based on aleatoric uncertainty. The model also incorporates a contrastive teacher‑student alignment to stabilize training and has been shown to outperform state‑of‑the‑art baselines on large‑scale TikTok and Amazon datasets, providing both higher accuracy and interpretability.

By Ahmad Mousavi (Department of Mathematics,Statistics American University), Majid Alikhani (Independent Researcher), Yeon-Chang Lee (Department of Computer Science,Engineering Ulsan National Institute of Science,Technology), Roberto Corizzo (Department of Computer Science American University), Yeganeh Abdollahinejad (Department of Biosystems,Agricultural Engineering Michigan State University)
arXiv AI
Aug 5

From Generator to Embedder: Harnessing Innate Abilities of Multimodal LLMs via Building Zero-Shot Discriminative Embedding Model

arXiv:2508. 00955v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into universal embedding models typically demands resource-intensive contrastive pre-training, while traditional hard negative mining methods suffer from severe false negative contamination.

By Yeong-Joon Ju, Seong-Whan Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

Reconstructing Content with Collaborative Attention for Universal Multimodal Representation Learning

arXiv:2603. 01471v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal embedding models, rooted in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), have yielded significant performance improvements across diverse tasks such as retrieval and classification.

By Jiahan Chen, Da Li, Hengran Zhang, Yinqiong Cai, Lixin Su, Jiafeng Guo, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Keping Bi