ABC: Achieving Better Control of Multimodal Embeddings using VLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Schneider, Benjamin, Kerschbaum, Florian, Chen, Wenhu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Schneider, Benjamin
Kerschbaum, Florian
Chen, Wenhu
author_facet Schneider, Benjamin
Kerschbaum, Florian
Chen, Wenhu
contents Visual embedding models excel at zero-shot tasks like visual retrieval and classification. However, these models cannot be used for tasks that contain ambiguity or require user instruction. These tasks necessitate an embedding model which outputs can use a natural language instruction to control the representation of a visual embedding. Existing CLIP-based approaches embed images and text independently, and fuse the result. We find that this results in weak interactions between modalities, and poor user control over the representation. We introduce ABC, an open-source multimodal embedding model that uses a vision-language model backbone to deeply integrate image features with natural language instructions. ABC achieves best-for-size performance on MSCOCO image-to-text retrieval and is the top performing model on classification and VQA tasks in the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark. With a strongly unified vision-language representation, ABC can use natural language to solve subtle and potentially ambiguous visual retrieval problems. To evaluate this capability, we design CtrlBench, a benchmark that requires interleaving textual instructions with image content for correct retrieval. ABC advances the state of visual embeddings, outputting high-quality visual representations with natural language control. Our model and datasets are available at our project page: https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/ABC/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_00329
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ABC: Achieving Better Control of Multimodal Embeddings using VLMs
Schneider, Benjamin
Kerschbaum, Florian
Chen, Wenhu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Visual embedding models excel at zero-shot tasks like visual retrieval and classification. However, these models cannot be used for tasks that contain ambiguity or require user instruction. These tasks necessitate an embedding model which outputs can use a natural language instruction to control the representation of a visual embedding. Existing CLIP-based approaches embed images and text independently, and fuse the result. We find that this results in weak interactions between modalities, and poor user control over the representation. We introduce ABC, an open-source multimodal embedding model that uses a vision-language model backbone to deeply integrate image features with natural language instructions. ABC achieves best-for-size performance on MSCOCO image-to-text retrieval and is the top performing model on classification and VQA tasks in the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark. With a strongly unified vision-language representation, ABC can use natural language to solve subtle and potentially ambiguous visual retrieval problems. To evaluate this capability, we design CtrlBench, a benchmark that requires interleaving textual instructions with image content for correct retrieval. ABC advances the state of visual embeddings, outputting high-quality visual representations with natural language control. Our model and datasets are available at our project page: https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/ABC/
title ABC: Achieving Better Control of Multimodal Embeddings using VLMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00329