mmE5: Improving Multimodal Multilingual Embeddings via High-quality
  Synthetic Data
Authors: name: Haonan Chen; name: Liang Wang; name: Nan Yang; name: Yutao Zhu; name: Ziliang Zhao; name: Furu Wei; name: Zhicheng Dou
Published: 2025-02-12 15:03:33

Abstract: Multimodal embedding models have gained significant attention for their
ability to map data from different modalities, such as text and images, into a
unified representation space. However, the limited labeled multimodal data
often hinders embedding performance. Recent approaches have leveraged data
synthesis to address this problem, yet the quality of synthetic data remains a
critical bottleneck. In this work, we identify three criteria for high-quality
synthetic multimodal data. First, broad scope ensures that the generated data
covers diverse tasks and modalities, making it applicable to various downstream
scenarios. Second, robust cross-modal alignment makes different modalities
semantically consistent. Third, high fidelity ensures that the synthetic data
maintains realistic details to enhance its reliability. Guided by these
principles, we synthesize datasets that: (1) cover a wide range of tasks,
modality combinations, and languages, (2) are generated via a deep thinking
process within a single pass of a multimodal large language model, and (3)
incorporate real-world images with accurate and relevant texts, ensuring
fidelity through self-evaluation and refinement. Leveraging these high-quality
synthetic and labeled datasets, we train a multimodal multilingual E5 model
mmE5. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mmE5 achieves state-of-the-art
performance on the MMEB Benchmark and superior multilingual performance on the
XTD benchmark. Our codes, datasets and models are released in
https://github.com/haon-chen/mmE5.