Reasoning-Augmented Representations for Multimodal Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Jianrui, Rajan, Anirudh Sundara, Han, Brandon, Lee, Soochahn, Ganguly, Sukanta, Lee, Yong Jae
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866912885654945792
author Zhang, Jianrui
Rajan, Anirudh Sundara
Han, Brandon
Lee, Soochahn
Ganguly, Sukanta
Lee, Yong Jae
author_facet Zhang, Jianrui
Rajan, Anirudh Sundara
Han, Brandon
Lee, Soochahn
Ganguly, Sukanta
Lee, Yong Jae
contents Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR) seeks any-to-any search across text and vision, yet modern embedding models remain brittle when queries require latent reasoning (e.g., resolving underspecified references or matching compositional constraints). We argue this brittleness is often data-induced: when images carry "silent" evidence and queries leave key semantics implicit, a single embedding pass must both reason and compress, encouraging spurious feature matching. We propose a data-centric framework that decouples these roles by externalizing reasoning before retrieval. Using a strong Vision--Language Model, we make implicit semantics explicit by densely captioning visual evidence in corpus entries, resolving ambiguous multimodal references in queries, and rewriting verbose instructions into concise retrieval constraints. Inference-time enhancement alone is insufficient; the retriever must be trained on these semantically dense representations to avoid distribution shift and fully exploit the added signal. Across M-BEIR, our reasoning-augmented training method yields consistent gains over strong baselines, with ablations showing that corpus enhancement chiefly benefits knowledge-intensive queries while query enhancement is critical for compositional modification requests. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/AugmentedRetrieval/ReasoningAugmentedRetrieval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07125
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning-Augmented Representations for Multimodal Retrieval
Zhang, Jianrui
Rajan, Anirudh Sundara
Han, Brandon
Lee, Soochahn
Ganguly, Sukanta
Lee, Yong Jae
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR) seeks any-to-any search across text and vision, yet modern embedding models remain brittle when queries require latent reasoning (e.g., resolving underspecified references or matching compositional constraints). We argue this brittleness is often data-induced: when images carry "silent" evidence and queries leave key semantics implicit, a single embedding pass must both reason and compress, encouraging spurious feature matching. We propose a data-centric framework that decouples these roles by externalizing reasoning before retrieval. Using a strong Vision--Language Model, we make implicit semantics explicit by densely captioning visual evidence in corpus entries, resolving ambiguous multimodal references in queries, and rewriting verbose instructions into concise retrieval constraints. Inference-time enhancement alone is insufficient; the retriever must be trained on these semantically dense representations to avoid distribution shift and fully exploit the added signal. Across M-BEIR, our reasoning-augmented training method yields consistent gains over strong baselines, with ablations showing that corpus enhancement chiefly benefits knowledge-intensive queries while query enhancement is critical for compositional modification requests. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/AugmentedRetrieval/ReasoningAugmentedRetrieval.
title Reasoning-Augmented Representations for Multimodal Retrieval
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07125