arXiv AI

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 Computer Vision
Sep 16

FLAT: Resampling Image and Text into 1D Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal Tokens for Retrieval and Generation

FLAT (Flexible‑Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a joint multimodal pre‑training framework that learns a shared encoder for images and text, producing 1‑D continuous embeddings that can be directly used by downstream generative decoders. By combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross‑modal generative objectives, FLAT yields representations that are both discriminative and generative, enabling cross‑modal retrieval and generation with a single pre‑training stage. The model achieves strong performance on T2I generation (GenEval 71.1), image captioning (BLEU‑4 40.5, CIDEr 138.6), and retrieval tasks (Recall@5 86.8/75.8 on MS‑COCO, 98.3/93.6 on Flickr30K), and supports linear interpolation, latent space arithmetic, and zero‑shot composed retrieval.

By Guangyu Sun, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Wentao Bao, Robert Zhenheng Yang, Xiao Wang, Xiyuan Wang, Yujunrong Ma, Chen Yuan, Max Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao, Jianpeng Cheng
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
arXiv AI
Aug 20

UMER: Unifying Embedding and Ranking via Pair-Aware Discriminative Reasoning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

WIDE: Wildcard Inference with Dynamic Expansion for Cross-Modal Generative Retrieval

The paper introduces WIDE, a method for cross‑modal generative retrieval that tackles information asymmetry between text queries and visual candidates. WIDE uses Adaptive Entropy Thresholding to set uncertainty limits, Asymmetry‑aware Wildcard Decoding to emit wildcards where the model lacks fine‑grained detail, and Blind‑Spot Re‑ranking to score an expanded candidate set with both discrete confidence and continuous similarity. Experiments on the M‑BEIR benchmark show that WIDE reduces forced hallucination and outperforms existing generative retrieval approaches while keeping index structures compact.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

WIDE: Wildcard Inference with Dynamic Expansion for Cross-Modal Generative Retrieval

WIDE: Wildcard Inference with Dynamic Expansion for Cross-Modal Generative Retrieval proposes a new approach to address information asymmetry in cross-modal retrieval. The method introduces Adaptive Entropy Thresholding to calibrate uncertainty, Asymmetry-aware Wildcard Decoding to emit wildcards instead of forced identifiers, and Blind-Spot Re-ranking to evaluate expanded candidates. Experiments on the M-BEIR benchmark show that WIDE outperforms existing generative retrieval methods by reducing forced hallucination while keeping index structures compact.

By Teng Guo, Xin Wang, Jiayou Xu, Keying Zhou, Jifeng Shen, Haoxin Ruan
arXiv AI
Sep 1

When Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception

The paper introduces CERES, a closed‑loop multimodal indexing framework that addresses semantic collapse in multimodal generation by building a three‑level semantic pyramid and using scale‑routed cross‑attention to generate images that remain retrievable by their original queries. CERES employs a co‑occurrence‑aware router, a lightweight U‑Net generator, and a soft‑Jaccard coverage objective to ensure generated images cover the intended concepts, verified by re‑indexing with a frozen vision‑language model and an external DINOv2 probe. Experiments on four pansharpening benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, especially under extreme scale variation, and significant improvements in concept‑query retrieval and image‑text ranking metrics.

By Guangyuan Dong, Chuang Liu, Haoyu Wang, Yangchen Zeng, Jiaqi Zhang, Li Jiuxing, Xiaoyang Yu, Pinlong Zhao, Yuchao Hou, Ziwei Li, Zheng Lin, Alexander Lim Han Yang, Yusen Wu
arXiv AI
Aug 24

When Generated Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception

arXiv:2608. 20810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal information systems increasingly route generated visual content back through the same vision-language index that informed its production, so the output must remain retrievable by the queries it was meant to serve.

By Guangyuan Dong, Chuang Liu, Yangchen Zeng, Haoyu Wang, Xiaoyang Yu, Pinlong Zhao, Yuchao Hou, Ziwei Li, Zheng Lin