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:2605.16638v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that Universal Multimodal Embedding (UME) benefits significantly from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In this pa...
By Jianpeng Cheng, Xian Wu, Jiangfan Zhang, Wentao Bao, Chaitanya Ahuja, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Xuanming Cui, Hanchao Yu, Yang Gao, Fan Xia, Haixing Dai, Frankie Yuan, Zihao Wang, Xiaobing Chen, Qi Guo, Shaodan Zhai, Aashu Singh, Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao
The paper introduces the Multi-modal Knowledge Preserving Adapter (MKP-Adapter), an adapter-only approach that enables backward compatible training for multi-modal large language models without updating the backbone. It employs a multi-level preservation loss to maintain embedding geometry and a focal re-weighting strategy to focus on difficult samples. Experiments show strong backward compatibility across image, text, visual document, and video retrieval tasks with minimal latency overhead.
By Jaeseok Byun, Gukyeong Kwon, Han-Kai Hsu, Meher Gitika Karumuri, Zhikang Zhang, Hao Yang, Davide Modolo
MMEmb-R1 is a multimodal embedding framework that enhances reasoning by treating it as a latent variable and selecting beneficial reasoning paths through pair-aware selection and counterfactual intervention. It uses reinforcement learning to invoke reasoning only when necessary, reducing unnecessary computation and latency. On the MMEB-V2 benchmark, MMEmb-R1 achieves a state‑of‑the‑art score of 71.2 with just 4 B parameters.
By Yuchi Wang, Dingkang Yang, Haiyang Yu, Weikang Bian, Jiefeng Long, Xiao Liang, Chao Feng, Hongsheng Li
arXiv:2605. 05225v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models (MoE MLLMs) suffer from a significant efficiency bottleneck during Expert Parallelism (EP) inference due to the straggler effect.
By Bo Li, Chuan Wu, Shaolin Zhu
Upgrading embedding models typically requires expensive database re-indexing, as new query embeddings are incompatible with existing database embeddings. While Backward Compatible Training (BCT) mitig...