arXiv Machine Learning

NanoVDR: Distilling a 2B Vision-Language Retriever into a 70M Text-Only Encoder for Visual Document Retrieval

arXiv AI
Sep 3

NeoMME: A Single-Tower Multimodal-Native Multilingual Foundation Encoder for Efficient Fine-Tuning and Inference

NeoMME is a family of 260M and 800M‑parameter multimodal‑native multilingual encoders that process text and raw image patches in a single bidirectional Transformer. Trained from scratch with a masked discrete‑diffusion objective conditioned on visible image patches, NeoMME supports a 16,384‑token context, enabling encoding of up to two 4K UHD images. In downstream tests, NeoMME‑Retriever models outperform all sub‑800M‑parameter baselines on the ViDoRe v3 benchmark and achieve twice the throughput of ColModernVBERT on an NVIDIA L40S, while hierarchical token pooling and asymmetric quantization compress embeddings 255× with minimal loss in retrieval performance.

By Aur\'elien Lac, Tony Wu
arXiv AI
Jun 30

PIXELRAG: Web Screenshots Beat Text for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2606. 28344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with retrieved web text has become a dominant paradigm, yet the web is not natively textual: existing systems depend on complex parsing pipelines that linearize HTML and discard layout, visual structure, and formatting.

By Yichuan Wang, Zhifei Li, Zirui Wang, Paul Teiletche, Lesheng Jin, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Sewon Min
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Invoice Haystack: Benchmarking Document Retrieval and Visual Question Answering Under Strong Visual Homogeneity

The paper introduces Invoice Haystack, a benchmark of 1,500 anonymized invoices and 200 question‑answer pairs that tests document retrieval and visual question answering under strong visual homogeneity. It shows that existing benchmarks suffer from embedding collapse, with Invoice Haystack’s mean pairwise cosine similarity at 0.73 versus 0.38 and 0.31 in DocHaystack and InfoHaystack. The authors propose VL‑RAG, a hybrid retrieval‑augmented generation framework that combines text and visual embeddings and a VLM‑based verification filter, achieving 60.0% Recall@1 on Invoice Haystack‑500 and improving performance on other benchmarks.

By Heethanjan Kanagalingam, Thenukan Pathmanathan, Mokeeshan Vathanakumar, Basim Azam, Sarah Monazam Erfani, Naveed Akhtar
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

PRISM: Self-Pruning Intrinsic Selection Method for Training-Free Multimodal Data Selection

PRISM is a training‑free framework that efficiently selects visual instruction data for multimodal large language models by addressing the anisotropy in visual feature distributions, which causes a Global Semantic Drift. By implicitly re‑centering visual semantics, PRISM removes the influence of global background features, cutting data‑selection and model‑tuning time to 30% of conventional pipelines while improving performance across eight multimodal and three language benchmarks, achieving a 101.7% relative gain over baseline models.

By Jinhe Bi, Aniri, Zengjie Jin, Yifan Wang, Danqi Yan, Wenke Huang, Xiaowen Ma, Sikuan Yan, Artur Hecker, Mang Ye, Xun Xiao, Hinrich Schuetze, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
arXiv AI
Aug 19

DEPT: Document Embedding Preservation Tuning for Unified Query Expansion and Retrieval

The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.

By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 2

MIDR: Enrichment-Augmented Indexing for Multimodal Document Retrieval

MIDR (Multimodal Indexing for Document Retrieval) is a training‑free framework that enriches document indexes by converting rendered pages into verified textual fields with a multimodal LLM, then indexing those fields with BM25F and optionally fusing with dense retrieval. By shifting multimodal reasoning to index time, MIDR enables text‑centric serving while retaining multimodal evidence, achieving a 23.0% relative gain over BM25 on ViDoRe V3 and outperforming ColQwen2.5 on several domains with significantly smaller index memory and lower query latency.

By Debanjan Mahata, Atharva Tendle, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Yong Zhuang, Ozan Irsoy
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Token-Budget Distillation: Transferring Full-Token Semantics to Compressed Video Vision-Language Models

Token-Budget Distillation (TBD) is a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework that adapts video vision‑language models to a fixed token budget. It freezes the pretrained backbone, updates only LoRA adapters, and incorporates FlashVID visual token compression. TBD uses a dual‑path teacher‑student design with full‑token supervision and compressed student optimization, enabling the student to recover full‑token semantics while remaining efficient under aggressive token reduction.

By Xiaoyang Guo, Guoping Luo, Jusheng Zhang, Keze Wang, Wenhao Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

DataComp-VLM: Improved Open Datasets for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 28551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building performant Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires carefully curating large-scale training datasets, yet the community lacks systematic benchmarks for evaluating such curation strategies.

By Matteo Farina, Vishaal Udandarao, Thao Nguyen, Selim Kuzucu, Maximilian B\"other, Andreas Hochlehnert, Adhiraj Ghosh, Marianna Nezhurina, Karsten Roth, Joschka Struber, Yuhui Zhang, Sebastian Dziadzio, Elaine Sui, Soumya Jahagirdar, Dhruba Ghosh, Hasan Hammoud, Thomas De Min, Simone Caldarella, Jehanzeb Mirza, Sedrick Keh, Mehdi Cherti, Hilde Kuehne, Bernt Schiele, Serena Yeung-Levy, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Ana Klimovic, Elisa Ricci, Matthias Bethge, Sewoong Oh, Ameya Prabhu, Alessio Tonioni, Jenia Jitsev, Massimiliano Mancini, Ludwig Schmidt, Nikhil Parthasarathy