Reason to Contrast: A Cascaded Multimodal Retrieval Framework

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Cui, Xuanming, Chen, Hong-You, Yu, Hao, Yuan, Hao, Wang, Zihao, Mishra, Shlok Kumar, Yu, Hanchao, Yang, Yonghuan, Xiao, Jun, Lim, Ser-Nam, Cheng, Jianpeng, Guo, Qi, Fan, Xiangjun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Cui, Xuanming
Chen, Hong-You
Yu, Hao
Yuan, Hao
Wang, Zihao
Mishra, Shlok Kumar
Yu, Hanchao
Yang, Yonghuan
Xiao, Jun
Lim, Ser-Nam
Cheng, Jianpeng
Guo, Qi
Fan, Xiangjun
author_facet Cui, Xuanming
Chen, Hong-You
Yu, Hao
Yuan, Hao
Wang, Zihao
Mishra, Shlok Kumar
Yu, Hanchao
Yang, Yonghuan
Xiao, Jun
Lim, Ser-Nam
Cheng, Jianpeng
Guo, Qi
Fan, Xiangjun
contents Traditional multimodal retrieval systems rely primarily on bi-encoder architectures, where performance is closely tied to embedding dimensionality. Recent work, Think-Then-Embed (TTE), shows that incorporating multimodal reasoning to elicit additional informative tokens before embedding can further improve retrieval. In this paper, we extend this paradigm with TTE-v2, a hybrid multimodal retrieval framework that introduces reasoning-driven performance scaling based on additional input token budget rather than model or embedding size. Our approach augments the initial multimodal retrieval with additional reasoning steps for reranking, enabling more expressive query-candidate interactions at test time. The reranking stage further provides fine-grained supervision for hard negative mining and false negative filtering, creating a feedback loop that effectively strengthens the upstream retriever. This cascaded design delivers substantial test-time improvements based on intermediate reasoning token scaling. Experiments on the MMEB-V2 benchmark demonstrate that TTE-v2-7B achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 75.7%, and that TTE-v2-2B matches or surpasses leading 7B models trained with significantly larger external data. Our results highlight the promise of token-wise scaling as an alternative scaling paradigm for multimodal retrieval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_23369
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reason to Contrast: A Cascaded Multimodal Retrieval Framework
Cui, Xuanming
Chen, Hong-You
Yu, Hao
Yuan, Hao
Wang, Zihao
Mishra, Shlok Kumar
Yu, Hanchao
Yang, Yonghuan
Xiao, Jun
Lim, Ser-Nam
Cheng, Jianpeng
Guo, Qi
Fan, Xiangjun
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Traditional multimodal retrieval systems rely primarily on bi-encoder architectures, where performance is closely tied to embedding dimensionality. Recent work, Think-Then-Embed (TTE), shows that incorporating multimodal reasoning to elicit additional informative tokens before embedding can further improve retrieval. In this paper, we extend this paradigm with TTE-v2, a hybrid multimodal retrieval framework that introduces reasoning-driven performance scaling based on additional input token budget rather than model or embedding size. Our approach augments the initial multimodal retrieval with additional reasoning steps for reranking, enabling more expressive query-candidate interactions at test time. The reranking stage further provides fine-grained supervision for hard negative mining and false negative filtering, creating a feedback loop that effectively strengthens the upstream retriever. This cascaded design delivers substantial test-time improvements based on intermediate reasoning token scaling. Experiments on the MMEB-V2 benchmark demonstrate that TTE-v2-7B achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 75.7%, and that TTE-v2-2B matches or surpasses leading 7B models trained with significantly larger external data. Our results highlight the promise of token-wise scaling as an alternative scaling paradigm for multimodal retrieval.
title Reason to Contrast: A Cascaded Multimodal Retrieval Framework
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23369