Is Reasoning Always Useful? Rethinking Reasoning Utility in Universal Multimodal Embeddings

arXiv:2609.29560 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-08-26 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-08-26

Updated: 2026-08-26

Terminology

• Embeddings — 33× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 18× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 16× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptive Reasoning — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verifier — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 5× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 5× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Aggregation — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Consistency — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Grounding — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Latent Reasoning — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 2× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Score-structure Utility Router for Embeddings — 2× in this paper
• Transformer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Visual Grounding — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AUC — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Entanglement — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Few-Shot Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Instruction Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Integrated Gradients — 1× in this paper
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Representation Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Unified Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes

Sources

• Reason to Contrast: A Cascaded Multimodal Retrieval Framework
• TRACE: Task-Adaptive Reasoning and Representation Learning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval
• PLUME: Latent Reasoning Based Universal Multimodal Embedding
• Embed-RL: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Multimodal Embeddings
• Qwen3-VL-Embedding and Qwen3-VL-Reranker: A Unified Framework for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Retrieval and Ranking
• Bottleneck Tokens for Unified Multimodal Retrieval
• MMEmb-R1: Reasoning-Enhanced Multimodal Embedding with Pair-Aware Selection and Adaptive Control

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