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Main Authors: Zhao, Jinghan, Jin, Wenwei, Li, Anqi, Tong, Jintao, Mo, Luya, Li, Jiawei, Li, Bin, Hu, Yao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29287
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author Zhao, Jinghan
Jin, Wenwei
Li, Anqi
Tong, Jintao
Mo, Luya
Li, Jiawei
Li, Bin
Hu, Yao
author_facet Zhao, Jinghan
Jin, Wenwei
Li, Anqi
Tong, Jintao
Mo, Luya
Li, Jiawei
Li, Bin
Hu, Yao
contents Item-to-Item (I2I) retrieval is a fundamental part of modern content platforms, supporting critical industrial workflows from recommendation engines to content auditing. While multimodal embedding methods have advanced general retrieval, they often falter in I2I scenarios due to the challenges of balancing global content representation with fine-grained local retrieval, the systemic inefficiency of decoupled embedding-and-ranking pipelines, and the inherent trade-offs between model precision and serving latency. To solve these issues, we propose \textbf{UniNote}, a unified embedding model designed for industrial I2I retrieval. Tailored retrieval strategies are introduced to support representation learning over complex, multimodal content at varying granularities. To operationalize these strategies, UniNote employs a two-stage training paradigm: the first stage leverages contrastive SFT to establish robust base embeddings, while the second stage refines ranking quality through a reinforcement learning (RL) process that aligns the model with content relevance. Our results show that UniNote achieves SOTA performance across diverse I2I tasks. Deployed at Xiaohongshu and integrated with Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL), UniNote achieved significant improvements in retrieval quality and cost efficiency in large-scale applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_29287
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniNote: A Unified Embedding Model for Multimodal Representation and Ranking
Zhao, Jinghan
Jin, Wenwei
Li, Anqi
Tong, Jintao
Mo, Luya
Li, Jiawei
Li, Bin
Hu, Yao
Information Retrieval
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Item-to-Item (I2I) retrieval is a fundamental part of modern content platforms, supporting critical industrial workflows from recommendation engines to content auditing. While multimodal embedding methods have advanced general retrieval, they often falter in I2I scenarios due to the challenges of balancing global content representation with fine-grained local retrieval, the systemic inefficiency of decoupled embedding-and-ranking pipelines, and the inherent trade-offs between model precision and serving latency. To solve these issues, we propose \textbf{UniNote}, a unified embedding model designed for industrial I2I retrieval. Tailored retrieval strategies are introduced to support representation learning over complex, multimodal content at varying granularities. To operationalize these strategies, UniNote employs a two-stage training paradigm: the first stage leverages contrastive SFT to establish robust base embeddings, while the second stage refines ranking quality through a reinforcement learning (RL) process that aligns the model with content relevance. Our results show that UniNote achieves SOTA performance across diverse I2I tasks. Deployed at Xiaohongshu and integrated with Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL), UniNote achieved significant improvements in retrieval quality and cost efficiency in large-scale applications.
title UniNote: A Unified Embedding Model for Multimodal Representation and Ranking
topic Information Retrieval
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29287