Ho-Joong Kim
2025
MIRe: Enhancing Multimodal Queries Representation via Fusion-Free Modality Interaction for Multimodal Retrieval
Yeong-Joon Ju
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Ho-Joong Kim
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Seong-Whan Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Recent multimodal retrieval methods have endowed text-based retrievers with multimodal capabilities by utilizing pre-training strategies for visual-text alignment. They often directly fuse the two modalities for cross-reference during the alignment to understand multimodal queries. However, existing methods often overlook crucial visual information due to a text-dominant issue, which overly depends on text-driven signals. In this paper, we introduce MIRe, a retrieval framework that achieves modality interaction without fusing textual features during the alignment. Our method allows the textual query to attend to visual embeddings while not feeding text-driven signals back into the visual representations. Additionally, we construct a pre-training dataset for multimodal query retrieval by transforming concise question-answer pairs into extended passages. Our experiments demonstrate that our pre-training strategy significantly enhances the understanding of multimodal queries, resulting in strong performance across four multimodal retrieval benchmarks under zero-shot settings. Moreover, our ablation studies and analyses explicitly verify the effectiveness of our framework in mitigating the text-dominant issue. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/yeongjoonJu/MIRe