Breaking the Modality Barrier: Universal Embedding Learning with
  Multimodal LLMs
Authors: name: Tiancheng Gu; name: Kaicheng Yang; name: Ziyong Feng; name: Xingjun Wang; name: Yanzhao Zhang; name: Dingkun Long; name: Yingda Chen; name: Weidong Cai; name: Jiankang Deng
Published: 2025-04-24 10:51:52

Abstract: The Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) framework has become a
widely used approach for multimodal representation learning, particularly in
image-text retrieval and clustering. However, its efficacy is constrained by
three key limitations: (1) text token truncation, (2) isolated image-text
encoding, and (3) deficient compositionality due to bag-of-words behavior.
While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated
significant advances in generalized vision-language understanding, their
potential for learning transferable multimodal representations remains
underexplored.In this work, we present UniME (Universal Multimodal Embedding),
a novel two-stage framework that leverages MLLMs to learn discriminative
representations for diverse downstream tasks. In the first stage, we perform
textual discriminative knowledge distillation from a powerful LLM-based teacher
model to enhance the embedding capability of the MLLM\'s language component. In
the second stage, we introduce hard negative enhanced instruction tuning to
further advance discriminative representation learning. Specifically, we
initially mitigate false negative contamination and then sample multiple hard
negatives per instance within each batch, forcing the model to focus on
challenging samples. This approach not only improves discriminative power but
also enhances instruction-following ability in downstream tasks. We conduct
extensive experiments on the MMEB benchmark and multiple retrieval tasks,
including short and long caption retrieval and compositional retrieval. Results
demonstrate that UniME achieves consistent performance improvement across all
tasks, exhibiting superior discriminative and compositional capabilities.