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
arXiv:2607. 23052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dual-encoder vision-language models (VLMs) expose a similarity interface that enables zero-shot retrieval but fails compositional constraints: queries like "umbrella and no person" retrieve images containing both, even when concept detection is reliable.
By Sultan Alshehri, Zhantao Yang, Han Zhang, Marios Savvides
arXiv:2602. 07774v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge.
By Mingfu Liang, Yufei Li, Jay Xu, Kavosh Asadi, Xi Liu, Shuo Gu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Frank Shyu, Shuaiwen Wang, Song Yang, Zhijing Li, Jiang Liu, Mengying Sun, Fei Tian, Xiaohan Wei, Chonglin Sun, Jacob Tao, Shike Mei, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Sandeep Pandey, Hamed Firooz, Luke Simon
The paper introduces SRAIN, a framework that learns sample‑wise, rank‑aware interpolation weights for composed visual data retrieval. Instead of relying on complex multimodal large language models, SRAIN uses simple linear interpolation in embedding space, dynamically predicting query‑specific weights through batch‑wise rank‑aware estimation and a compact memory bank for hard negatives. This approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on composed video retrieval and competitive results on composed image retrieval while significantly reducing query‑time latency.
By Boseung Jeong, Taegyu Park, Donghyeon Kwon, Hyunsouk Cho, Suha Kwak
arXiv:2606. 20280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR).
By Yuhan Liu, Pei Fu, Hang Li, Yukun Qi, Chao Jiang, Jingwen Fu, Zhen Liu, Bin Qin, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Jingmin Xin
E2Rank (Efficient Embedding-based Ranking) is a unified framework that extends a single text embedding model to perform both retrieval and listwise reranking. By treating the listwise prompt—constructed from the query and its top‑K candidates—as a pseudo‑relevance feedback query, E2Rank reranks via cosine similarity against precomputed document embeddings, avoiding costly autoregressive decoding. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on BEIR, competitive performance on the reasoning‑intensive BRIGHT benchmark, lower latency than existing LLM‑based rerankers, and improved embedding performance on MTEB—all within a single model.
By Qi Liu, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, Jiaxin Mao