arXiv AI

AiSearch: Interactive Multi-Modal Search with VLMs

AiSearch is a flexible multimodal retrieval framework that uses Vision Language Models (VLMs) to enable natural language search over images and videos. It supports interactive search refinement through user feedback, allowing results to be tailored to the user's intent in real time. The system also provides visual benchmarking across multiple VLMs, enabling users to choose the most suitable model for their specific task.

arXiv AI
Jun 16

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios.

By Zhengbo Zhang, Changtao Miao, Jinbo Su, Zhaowen Zhou, Chunxia Zhang, Xukai Wang, Ruiqi Liu, Kaiyuan Zheng, Jiansheng Cai, Bo Zhang, Zhe Li, Shiming Xiang, Ying Yan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 5

CoCo-IR: Contextual Composed Image Retrieval

Current instruction-based image retrieval systems are powerful but limited to single-turn interactions, failing to capture the iterative nature of complex, real-world visual searches. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contextual Composed Image Retrieval (CoCo-IR), a novel task that enables users to progressively refine search results through interactions.

arXiv AI
Jul 31

VistaHop: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Visual DeepSearch

arXiv:2606. 03273v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual DeepSearch tasks require multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to resolve complex visual queries by repeatedly inspecting image regions, grounding reasoning in visual evidence, and connecting fine-grained clues across multiple steps.

By Hang He, Chuhuai Yue, Chengqi Dong, Chengcheng Wan, Ting Su, Haiying Sun, Jiajun Chai, Xiaohan Wang, Guojun Yin
arXiv AI
Sep 1

MM-BrowseComp: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Browsing Agents

arXiv:2508.13186v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI agents with advanced reasoning and tool-use capabilities have demonstrated impressive performance in web browsing for deep search. However...

By Shilong Li, Xingyuan Bu, Wenjie Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Jun Dong, Haoyang He, Hao Lu, Haozhe Zhang, Chenchen Jing, Zhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Jiayi Tian, Chenchen Zhang, Tianhao Peng, Yancheng He, Jihao Gu, Hui Huang, Donghao Zhou, Yuanxing Zhang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Qiangpeng Yang, Shilei Wen
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.

By Davide Caffagni, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

FiRE: Enhancing MLLMs with Fine-Grained Context Learning for Complex Image Retrieval

Due to their strong generalizable multimodal processing and reasoning capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential as universal image retrievers, effectively addressing diverse real-world image retrieval tasks. Nevertheless, pioneering studies, while promising, overlook the potential of fine-grained context modeling and disentangled fine-tuning objectives in enhancing MLLMs' retrieval performance, particularly for complex tasks such as long-text-to-image retrieval, visual dialog retrieval, and composed image retrieval (CIR).

arXiv AI
Sep 17

ShotFinder: Imagination-Driven Open-Domain Video Shot Retrieval via Web Search

ShotFinder introduces a new benchmark for open‑domain video shot retrieval, formalizing editing requirements as keyframe‑oriented shot descriptions and adding five controllable constraints—temporal order, color, visual style, audio, and resolution. The benchmark comprises 1,210 high‑quality YouTube samples across 20 themes, generated with large models and verified by humans. A three‑stage retrieval pipeline—query expansion via video imagination, candidate video retrieval, and description‑guided shot localization—shows a notable performance gap to humans, especially for color and visual style constraints.

By Tao Yu, Haopeng Jin, Hao Wang, Shenghua Chai, Yujia Yang, Junhao Gong, Jiaming Guo, Minghui Zhang, Xinlong Chen, Zhenghao Zhang, Yuxuan Zhou, Yufei Xiong, Shanbin Zhang, Jiabing Yang, YiFan Zhang, Hongzhu Yi, Xinming Wang, Cheng Zhong, Xiao Ma, Zhang Zhang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang