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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

Similarity Is Not Logic: Factored Inference for Dual-Encoder Vision-Language Models

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 AI
3d ago

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