LLaVE: Large Language and Vision Embedding Models with Hardness-Weighted
  Contrastive Learning
Authors: name: Zhibin Lan; name: Liqiang Niu; name: Fandong Meng; name: Jie Zhou; name: Jinsong Su
Published: 2025-03-04 10:21:57

Abstract: Universal multimodal embedding models play a critical role in tasks such as
interleaved image-text retrieval, multimodal RAG, and multimodal clustering.
However, our empirical results indicate that existing LMM-based embedding
models trained with the standard InfoNCE loss exhibit a high degree of overlap
in similarity distribution between positive and negative pairs, making it
challenging to distinguish hard negative pairs effectively. To deal with this
issue, we propose a simple yet effective framework that dynamically improves
the embedding model's representation learning for negative pairs based on their
discriminative difficulty. Within this framework, we train a series of models,
named LLaVE, and evaluate them on the MMEB benchmark, which covers 4 meta-tasks
and 36 datasets. Experimental results show that LLaVE establishes stronger
baselines that achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance while demonstrating
strong scalability and efficiency. Specifically, LLaVE-2B surpasses the
previous SOTA 7B models, while LLaVE-7B achieves a further performance
improvement of 6.2 points. Although LLaVE is trained on image-text data, it can
generalize to text-video retrieval tasks in a zero-shot manner and achieve
strong performance, demonstrating its remarkable potential for transfer to
other embedding tasks.