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arXiv:2601.20107v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent Vision-Language Models (e.g., ColPali) enable fine-grained Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) but incur prohibitive multi-vector index st...
V-LUMEN introduces a visual lookup memory for vision‑language models by discretizing visual features with a frozen codebook, creating spatially aware memory keys via hashing, and modulating them with text‑conditioned relevance signals. The retrieved embeddings are fused into a frozen Qwen3‑VL‑2B backbone through a gated residual pathway, yielding substantial improvements on five reasoning‑intensive benchmarks and zero‑shot transfer to three disjoint image datasets. At a matched parameter budget, reallocating capacity from LoRA or MoE adapters to V‑LUMEN preserves accuracy on two backbones, demonstrating that external visual memory offers an independent capacity axis. whyItMatters":"The paper shows that adding a non‑parametric visual lookup memory can significantly boost vision‑language model performance without increasing per‑token compute, offering a new way to scale such models."
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.
arXiv:2606.02737v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dense retrieval compresses a passage into a single vector, but this compression is positionally skewed: early content dominates the embedding...
Multimodal models often build on architectures designed for generative vision-language modeling, typically combining separately pretrained vision encoders with causal language models. Visual document...
The paper uncovers a systematic mismatch in modern text embeddings: while sentiment can be extracted with high accuracy from frozen encoders, the embeddings’ cosine similarity metric barely reflects polarity differences. Across eleven models from 2021–2026, a linear probe achieves up to 91.3% accuracy, yet cosine similarity margins are only 0.003–0.064, leading to poor retrieval performance (e.g., Qwen3-Embedding-4B’s 64.3 MAP). Introducing a lightweight supervised‑contrastive head (Sentiment‑Injected Sentence Embeddings) dramatically improves probe accuracy, retrieval MAP, and polarity margins, but at the cost of downstream semantic similarity. "whyItMatters":"The findings reveal that widely used retrieval and clustering systems may ignore valuable sentiment information encoded in embeddings, impacting their effectiveness."