arXiv AI

When Features Become Instances: Inverted Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Feature Selection

The paper introduces Inverted Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Feature Selection (ICLFS), a method that treats each feature as a sample by inverting the data matrix and applies a contrastive learning framework to learn consistent representations across masked positive views and a shuffled negative view. Feature saliency is derived from the magnitude of projector‑space embeddings, and a Laplacian‑Gated Ranking Correction step refines the ranking by reducing local redundancy. Experiments on 12 benchmark datasets show that ICLFS achieves the best clustering accuracy on 10 datasets compared to both classical and neural baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of feature‑wise contrastive consistency for unsupervised feature selection.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

UVU: Improving Multimodal Understanding via Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Paradigm

UVU is a vision-language unified autoregressive framework that integrates visual supervision directly into the pre-training stage of multimodal large language models. By using continuous visual encoding and a large-scale iterative hierarchical clustering algorithm to build a pixel-level visual codebook, UVU enables lossless representation of visual inputs and autoregressive generation of pixel-level image tokens alongside textual tokens. This approach synergizes pixel-level visual perception with semantic-level visual understanding, allowing models to internalize visual reconstruction capabilities and improve multimodal understanding performance.

By Zhehan Kan, Xinghua Jiang, Yubo Zhu, Yanlin Liu, Xiaochen Yang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv AI
Oct 16

CIM-Embed: Learning Instruction-Conditioned Multimodal Embeddings for Clustering

CIM-Embed is a framework that learns instruction‑conditioned multimodal embeddings for clustering. It uses supervised contrastive learning with same‑group positives and negatives from other groups, and handles tasks with varying group counts via heterogeneous structured batches. At inference, the model maps an object’s image, text, and instruction to an embedding, and HDBSCAN clusters these embeddings without requiring a pre‑specified cluster count. The authors introduce ProductMIC, a benchmark of 5,373 Amazon products and 449 grouping tasks, and report a mean per‑task V‑measure of 95.01, outperforming the best general‑purpose baseline.

By Yinghua Xu, Pengyang Xie, Yanxiang Zhou, Chuanzhi Tong, Xiao Xiao, Chaoqun Feng, Xiaoqing Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

CORE: Improving Compositional Reasoning in MLLM Embedding via Reranker Distillation

CORE improves compositional reasoning in multimodal language models by distilling a cross‑attentive reranker’s fine‑grained judgments into the embedding model. It generates candidate lists across five compositional matching levels and trains with a Rank‑KL objective to replicate the reranker’s ranking. Experiments on COLA, SUGARCREPE++, and NEGBENCH show CORE‑RERANKER‑8B outperforms Jina‑Reranker by 10.7 points, while CORE‑EMBED‑8B achieves the best overall average among evaluated embeddings, with gains also transferring to the MCMR benchmark without harming COCO or Flickr30K retrieval.

By Tingyu Song, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Chu Liu, Pengjun Xie, Yilun Zhao, Shu Wu