The paper introduces AdaptiveEmbed, a framework that learns sample‑adaptive multi‑vector representations for multimodal retrieval. It proposes the SAMVR setting, where each sample receives a content‑adaptive embedding set whose size is determined by its retrieval utility. The method uses Multi‑Group Contrastive Learning with set‑to‑set similarity and Utility Policy Optimization to allocate representation capacity, achieving better performance across image, text, video, and audio benchmarks.
By Xinze Liu, Lei Yang, Dayan Wu, Hengjie Zhu, Zihao Zhang, Hanqi Wu, Tianzhu Hu, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang
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.
By Kaipeng Li, Haitao Yu, Xuanchen Zhou
arXiv:2609.37225v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for universal multimodal representation learning. However, existing methods eith...
By Zijing Cai, Yuzhe Wang, Jingxian Zhu, Fengbin Zhu, Richang Hong
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
By Fan Xu, Luis A. Leiva
arXiv:2609.15296v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Universal multimodal embedding (UME) learns unified representations across modalities, enabling a single model to support diverse retrieval tasks. Rece...
By Mingzhou Jiang, Peixi Wu, Hang Cheng, Yunhao Zhou, Biao Yang, Wei Yuan, Yun Li, Fan Yang, Wenwu Ou, Honghui He
arXiv:2609.05518v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Despite the strong capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their parametric knowledge remains incomplete and difficult to update, m...
By Jiacheng Cai, Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Huachi Zhou, Qinggang Zhang, Xiao Huang
arXiv:2607. 16305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong progress in multimodal understanding.
By Zeyu Xu, Xingzhong Hou, Pengkai Guo, Siling Lin, Xiao Xu, Menghua Zhai, Haoyu Chen, Yunke Zhang, Fei Huang
The paper introduces AllocEmbed, an allocate‑then‑embed framework that reallocates a fixed visual‑input budget across more video frames to improve retrieval performance. A lightweight allocator uses low‑cost previews to assign frame‑wise resolutions before the embedding backbone, preserving detail where it most benefits retrieval while reducing visual cost elsewhere. Retrieval‑Driven Policy Optimization (RDPO) learns the allocator directly from retrieval feedback, and the method integrates with existing systems without modifying the embedding model.
By Song Jin, Zhongtao Jiang, Chenglei Shen, Huanxuan Liao, Haozhe Chi, Zhiwei Wang, Kun Xu, Yong Liu
UMER is a Unified Multimodal Embedding and Ranking framework that combines contrastive embeddings with Pair‑Aware Discriminative Reasoning to improve universal multimodal retrieval. It replaces item‑wise reflection with pair‑wise comparison of query–candidate pairs, enabling explicit identification of matching and discrepancy evidence. A mutual distillation strategy transfers reliable pairwise preferences between the embedding and ranking components, and UMER achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the MMEB‑V2 benchmark while supporting budget‑adjustable inference.
By Libiao Chen, Xiyang Liu, Yanheng Wei, Tao Wang, Zhenyu Tang
Multimodal representation learning has largely relied on contrastive models like CLIP that produce a single embedding per sample, which limits their ability to capture relation-dependent relevance. The proposed Relation-Conditioned Multimodal Learning (RCML) framework explicitly conditions embeddings on natural‑language relation descriptions, enabling the same sample to be represented differently under various relational contexts. RCML builds relation‑aware training pairs, incorporates a relation‑conditioned module, and uses a unified contrastive objective to jointly model cross‑modal alignment and relation‑induced structure, achieving superior performance on retrieval and classification tasks across zero‑shot, fine‑tuned, and out‑of‑domain settings.
By Yang Qiao, Yuntong Hu, Bowen Zhu, Hasibul Haque, Liang Zhao
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
arXiv:2606. 04240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval over visually-rich documents, pages that interleave text with figures, tables, and charts, is essential for multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, yet most retrievers still discard the visual channel.
By Jingbiao Mei