Modality Curation: Building Universal Embeddings for Advanced Multimodal Information Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kong, Fanheng, Zhang, Jingyuan, Liu, Yahui, Zhang, Hongzhi, Feng, Shi, Yang, Xiaocui, Wang, Daling, Tian, Yu, W., Victoria, Zhang, Fuzheng, Zhou, Guorui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kong, Fanheng
Zhang, Jingyuan
Liu, Yahui
Zhang, Hongzhi
Feng, Shi
Yang, Xiaocui
Wang, Daling
Tian, Yu
W., Victoria
Zhang, Fuzheng
Zhou, Guorui
author_facet Kong, Fanheng
Zhang, Jingyuan
Liu, Yahui
Zhang, Hongzhi
Feng, Shi
Yang, Xiaocui
Wang, Daling
Tian, Yu
W., Victoria
Zhang, Fuzheng
Zhou, Guorui
contents Multimodal information retrieval (MIR) faces inherent challenges due to the heterogeneity of data sources and the complexity of cross-modal alignment. While previous studies have identified modal gaps in feature spaces, a systematic approach to address these challenges remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce UNITE, a universal framework that tackles these challenges through two critical yet underexplored aspects: data curation and modality-aware training configurations. Our work provides the first comprehensive analysis of how modality-specific data properties influence downstream task performance across diverse scenarios. Moreover, we propose Modal-Aware Masked Contrastive Learning (MAMCL) to mitigate the competitive relationships among the instances of different modalities. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple multimodal retrieval benchmarks, outperforming existing methods by notable margins. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that strategic modality curation and tailored training protocols are pivotal for robust cross-modal representation learning. This work not only advances MIR performance but also provides a foundational blueprint for future research in multimodal systems. Our project is available at https://friedrichor.github.io/projects/UNITE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19650
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modality Curation: Building Universal Embeddings for Advanced Multimodal Information Retrieval
Kong, Fanheng
Zhang, Jingyuan
Liu, Yahui
Zhang, Hongzhi
Feng, Shi
Yang, Xiaocui
Wang, Daling
Tian, Yu
W., Victoria
Zhang, Fuzheng
Zhou, Guorui
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Information Retrieval
Multimedia
Multimodal information retrieval (MIR) faces inherent challenges due to the heterogeneity of data sources and the complexity of cross-modal alignment. While previous studies have identified modal gaps in feature spaces, a systematic approach to address these challenges remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce UNITE, a universal framework that tackles these challenges through two critical yet underexplored aspects: data curation and modality-aware training configurations. Our work provides the first comprehensive analysis of how modality-specific data properties influence downstream task performance across diverse scenarios. Moreover, we propose Modal-Aware Masked Contrastive Learning (MAMCL) to mitigate the competitive relationships among the instances of different modalities. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple multimodal retrieval benchmarks, outperforming existing methods by notable margins. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that strategic modality curation and tailored training protocols are pivotal for robust cross-modal representation learning. This work not only advances MIR performance but also provides a foundational blueprint for future research in multimodal systems. Our project is available at https://friedrichor.github.io/projects/UNITE.
title Modality Curation: Building Universal Embeddings for Advanced Multimodal Information Retrieval
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Information Retrieval
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19650