Geospatial and urban applications increasingly require models to compare heterogeneous evidence across street-view imagery, remote-sensing observations, text descriptions, region proposals, and temporal change cues. However, existing multimodal embedding models and benchmarks are still largely designed and evaluated around general-purpose image-text matching, leaving unclear whether unified embedding space can support heterogeneous geospatial tasks involving spatial relationships, fine-grained semantics, and temporal changes.
The paper introduces ReT-2, a unified retrieval model that handles multimodal queries containing both images and text and searches across multimodal document collections. It employs a recurrent Transformer architecture with LSTM-inspired gating to integrate information across layers and modalities, capturing fine-grained visual and textual details. Evaluations on M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, faster inference, and lower memory usage, and the model also boosts downstream tasks in retrieval‑augmented generation pipelines.
By Davide Caffagni, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
arXiv:2608. 12987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative information retrieval (GIR) has emerged as a compelling alternative to the conventional index-retrieve-then-rank retrieval pipeline by training a generator to produce the identifiers of relevant items directly.
By Kaipeng Li, Haitao Yu, Xuanchen Zhou
arXiv:2608. 03826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Geospatial and urban applications increasingly require models to compare heterogeneous evidence across street-view imagery, remote-sensing observations, text descriptions, region proposals, and temporal change cues.
By Jiapeng Li, Yong Li, Junjie Zhou, Fan Zhang, Yu Liu
ShotFinder introduces a new benchmark for open‑domain video shot retrieval, formalizing editing requirements as keyframe‑oriented shot descriptions and adding five controllable constraints—temporal order, color, visual style, audio, and resolution. The benchmark comprises 1,210 high‑quality YouTube samples across 20 themes, generated with large models and verified by humans. A three‑stage retrieval pipeline—query expansion via video imagination, candidate video retrieval, and description‑guided shot localization—shows a notable performance gap to humans, especially for color and visual style constraints.
By Tao Yu, Haopeng Jin, Hao Wang, Shenghua Chai, Yujia Yang, Junhao Gong, Jiaming Guo, Minghui Zhang, Xinlong Chen, Zhenghao Zhang, Yuxuan Zhou, Yufei Xiong, Shanbin Zhang, Jiabing Yang, YiFan Zhang, Hongzhu Yi, Xinming Wang, Cheng Zhong, Xiao Ma, Zhang Zhang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang
arXiv:2606. 15134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched.
By Shubhang Bhatnagar, Dheeraj Baiju, Narendra Ahuja