Multimodal representation learning has been shifting from traditional two-tower architectures to large language model (LLM)-based embedders due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. Despite this progress, existing approaches primarily focus on language and image modalities, which also remain the dominant modalities for user-conditioned interactions in current embedders. In this paper, we propose the first Omni-Interactive Universal Embedder (OmniUE), which not only learns a unified embedding space across text, video, and audio by leveraging intermediate-layer representations from dedicated learnable tokens, but also supports omni-interactive querying, enabling users to provide inputs in the form of text, visual regions of interest, and audio spans. Within OmniUE, visual and audio segmenters process diverse user interactions and integrate them with an omni-LLM to produce user-conditioned any-to-any embeddings via context aggregation. To evaluate OmniUE's omni-interactive capabilities, we introduce OmniCHOIR, benchmarking models for omni-interactive compositional audio retrieval based on the given text, video, and audio as well as unimodal or multimodal interaction prompts. OmniUE consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines across diverse modalities, with average improvements of 10.4% on textual-interactive video benchmarks (MMEB-v2-video), 1.0% on audio tasks (MAEB), 83.1% on visual-interactive benchmarks (SCaR), and 21.9% on our omni-interactive OmniCHOIR benchmark. We believe that jointly advancing omni-modal representation learning and omni-interactive querying paves the way toward universal embedders. Project page: https://wywywang.github.io/omniue-demo/.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Applicability of OmniUE, which takes omni-interactive prompts ( p ) and queries ( q ) to retrieve any-modality targets ( c ), including text, image, video, and audio.
Figure 2: OmniUE overview. Compared to existing omni-LLM-based embedders (shown in gray; e.g., [ 58 ] ), OmniUE introduces three key components: 1) audio and visual segmenters that enable emerging interaction capabilities; 2) additional learnable tokens for modeling complex and compositional multimodal inputs; and 3) a context aggregation module that selectively weighs the token-layer importance of contextual tokens to produce the final embedding for contrastive learning.
Figure 3: The data collection pipeline for OmniCHOIR. We use SAM-Audio-Large for sound separation conditioned on text prompts, and Qwen3-Omni-30B as a captioner to synthesize ground-truth and negative background sound categories based on the visual information from the silent video. A dynamic sound mixer then injects background sounds into the target audio track with randomized temporal intervals and volume levels (-15 dB to -5 dB).
CLS
QA
RET
MRET
Overall
Model ↓∣ #Datasets →
5
5
5
3
18
Text + Image + Video
VLM2Vec-v2 (Qwen2-VL-2B) [ 38 ]
39.3
34.3
28.8
38.5
34.9
UME-R1 (Qwen2-VL-2B) [ 29 ]
44.3
51.2
32.9
39.7
42.2
UniME-V2 (LLaVA-OneVision-7B) [ 22 ]
37.2
50.6
28.9
39.6
39.0
UME-R1 (Qwen2-VL-7B) [ 29 ]
48.6
60.7
38.2
39.3
47.5
Table 1: Results on 18 MMEB tasks, with scores averaged per meta-task. Improvements are computed against the best-performing 2B/3B and 7B baselines. We highlight the best and second-best in each column. All results are from the leaderboard and [ 7 ] , except for LCO-Emb, which we reproduced.
Clf
M.Clf
PC
Rrnk
Clust
A. Rtrvl
X. Rtrvl
Zero Clf.
Overall
Model ↓∣ #Datasets →
10
2
3
1
3
1
8
2
30
Two-Tower-Based Embedders
microsoft/msclap-2023 [ 16 ]
45.0
5.8
53.6
75.4
15.2
87.3
9.4
12.6
31.1
laion/larger_clap_general [ 57 ]
51.7
2.3
51.9
66.8
6.6
93.2
9.8
14.9
32.2
LLM-Based Embedders
LCO-Emb (Qwen2.5-Omni-3B) [ 58 ]
56.4
41.6
66.7
75.4
1.3
67.7
50.3
62.2
50.7
Table 2: Results on 30 MAEB tasks. Scores are averaged per meta-task. Improvements are computed relative to the best-performing 3B and 7B baselines. We highlight the best and second-best results in each column. Baseline results are from the MAEB leaderboard.
Model ↓∣ Datasets →
RefCOCO+
RefCOCOg
VisualGenome
COCO-Stuff
ADE20K
Overall
Textual-Interactive-Only Models
VLM2Vec-2B [ 27 ]
24.5
29.5
22.3
19.4
24.6
24.1
VLM2Vec-7B [ 27 ]
23.2
29.1
14.7
25.0
22.4
22.9
MMRet-7B [ 72 ]
27.1
21.8
15.2
26.0
22.6
22.5
UniME-7B [ 22 ]
31.4
32.8
19.0
25.3
23.0
26.3
Textual + Visual-Interactive Models
Table 3: Results on 5 SCaR tasks. Improvements are computed relative to the best-performing 2B and 7B baselines. We highlight the best and second-best results in each column. Baseline results are from the original SCaR paper.
Model ↓∣ Conditions →
Text
Span
Mask
Text+Span
Text+Mask
Span+Mask
Text+Span+Mask
Two-Tower-Based Models
laion/larger_clap_general [ 57 ]
16.1
1.7/12.7
-
12.7
-
-
-
Textual-Interactive Omni-Modal Models
ImageBind [ 20 ]
16.8
3.3/13.5
-
18.1
-
-
-
LCO-Emb-3B [ 58 ]
19.6
18.7
-
20.5
-
-
-
LCO-Emb-7B [ 58 ]
22.3
22.4
-
23.8/23.8
-
-
-
Table 4: Results on OmniCHOIR. We highlight the best results in each column. Text refers to the interaction text prompt. For span scenarios, we 1) convert the selected span into text using the same instructions as in OmniUE and 2) directly crop the corresponding audio segment, reported as text/crop.
Appendix figures & tables9 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Configurations
OmniUE-3B
OmniUE-7B
Omni-LLM
Qwen2.5-Omni-3B
Qwen2.5-Omni-7B
Vision Segmenter
facebook/sam3
Audio Segmenter
facebook/sam-audio-base
# of heads in SAC ( h )
2
∣FvsH∣×∣FvsW∣
288 × 288
∣Fas∣
maximum 250
Appendix
Table 5: Detailed configurations for OmniUE 3B and 7B models.
Data Source
Modalities
# of Samples
AudioSet [ 19 ]
Video, Audio, Text*
86k
WavCaps [ 37 ]
Audio, Text
404k
MSR-VTT [ 63 ]
Video, Text
180k
PE-Videos [ 5 ]
Video, Text
983k
VALOR [ 33 ]
Video, Audio, Text
2k
VATEX [ 54 ]
Video, Text
5k
Appendix
Table 6: Overview of the training data used to train OmniUE. * denotes synthesized text captions.
MMEB-v2-video
MAEB
SCaR
OmniCHOIR
OmniUE-3B
44.7
47.8
50.5
22.2
w/o visual stream
42.7
47.6
32.0
20.5
w/o audio stream
44.1
47.4
49.8
18.7
w/o visual and audio streams
42.5
47.5
30.9
16.3
w/o multi-token inputs
43.8
46.6
47.2
20.1
w/o layer aggregation
43.2
45.0
49.8
18.5
Appendix
Table 7: Ablation study on the impact of each proposed component. "w/o visual and audio streams" denotes the removal of visual and audio interactions during both training and testing stages. "w/o visual stream" and "w/o audio stream" denote the removal of visual-only and audio-only interactions during both stages. "w/o multi-token inputs" replaces the K learnable tokens with the EOS hidden state, reducing W to RM . "w/o layer aggregation" removes the context aggregation module and applies mean pooling over the K tokens from the last layer.
Figure 4: Parameter study on 1) Aggregation from each l layers; 2) # of learnable tokens ( k ); 3) # of attention heads in SA ( h ); 4) LoRA ranks; 5) number of visual-interactive tokens ( ∣Fvs′∣ ); and 6) number of audio-interactive tokens ( ∣Fas′∣ ).
MMEB-v2-video
MAEB
SCaR
OmniCHOIR
OmniUE-3B
48.4
50.5
51.3
26.4
w/o learnable tokens & context aggregation
43.4
44.7
46.3
23.5
w/o visual & audio streams
46.5
48.2
32.9
19.3
Appendix
Table 8: Ablation study on the omni-interactions and architectural changes.
Choice
MMEB-v2-video
MAEB
SCaR
OmniCHOIR
small
43.4
46.7
49.3
21.5
base
44.7
47.8
50.5
22.2
large
44.2
48.1
50.2
20.8
Appendix
Table 9: Ablation study with OmniUE-3B on 1) audio segmenter size, 2) visual segmenter version, 3) segmenter connector design, and 4) layer aggregation variants. The highlighted row indicates the configurations used in OmniUE-3B and OmniUE-7B.
Query Mode
Time (per sample)
Memory
Performance
OmniCHOIR
LCO-Emb-7B
Text
1.0s
17.7GB
22.3
WAVE-7B
Text
1.3s
18.2GB
20.0
OmniUE-7B (Ours)
Text
1.3s
20.8GB
25.5
Span
1.3s
20.8GB
26.3
Mask
9.4s
20.8GB
26.7
Appendix
Table 10: Analysis on inference time and memory for unimodal and multimodal query modes of OmniUE-7B on OmniCHOIR.
Model ↓∣ Conditions →
Text
Span
Mask
Text+Span
Text+Mask
Span+Mask
Text+Span+Mask
OmniUE-7B
25.5
26.3
26.7
27.4
26.7
27.6
28.4
1) Random masks
-
-
16.8
-
21.3
22.5
22.9
2) Random spans
-
19.6
-
19.8
-
20.5
23.7
3) w/o text prompts
10.7
-
-
16.9
21.0
-
22.3
Appendix
Table 11: Analysis on noisy masks, spans, and text interaction prompts.
V2A
A2V
WAVE-7B
25.0
25.8
OmniUE-7B
27.2
26.1
Appendix
Table 12: Performance on V2A/A2V on VGGSound and VA2T/T2VA on VALOR-32K.
In this report, we introduce Ovis-Embedding, a state-of-the-art omni-modal embedding family built on native integration of text, image, video, and audio. Instead of assembling separate modality towers, Ovis-Embedding uses a shared multimodal backbone to encode different modalities in a common representation space. Specifically, we make three key advances: (1) native omni-modal initialization: we adopt a pretrained Qwen-omni model as the embedding backbone and adapt it through contrastive training with low-rank initialization; (2) data-centric omni-modal training: we construct a broad, high-quality corpus spanning text, images, video, audio, and interleaved multimodal data. To improve data efficiency, we introduce homogeneous-source sampling to form task-consistent batches with informative in-batch negatives; and (3) embedding-specific training and inference optimization: we use focal loss to emphasize hard examples and similarity-based Embedding Distillation to transfer fine-grained similarity structure from complementary experts. At inference time, low-rank feature decomposition enables compact embeddings with flexible dimensionality and minimal performance loss. Empirical evaluations show that the Ovis-Embedding family achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMEB-v3, MMEB-v2, MVEB, MAEB, and RTEB, demonstrating its effectiveness across text, image, video, and audio modalities. These results highlight the potential of unified omni-modal training to overcome modality fragmentation and advance universal embedding models for any-to-any retrieval.
Multimodal retrieval is the task of aggregating information from queries across heterogeneous modalities to retrieve desired targets. State-of-the-art multimodal retrieval models can understand complex queries, yet they are typically limited to two modalities: text and vision. This limitation impedes the development of universal retrieval systems capable of comprehending queries that combine more than two modalities. To advance toward this goal, we present OmniRet, the first retrieval model capable of handling complex, composed queries spanning three key modalities: text, vision, and audio. Our OmniRet model addresses two critical challenges for universal retrieval: computational efficiency and representation fidelity. First, feeding massive token sequences from modality-specific encoders to Large Language Models (LLMs) is computationally inefficient. We therefore introduce an attention-based resampling mechanism to generate compact, fixed-size representations from these sequences. Second, compressing rich omni-modal data into a single embedding vector inevitably causes information loss and discards fine-grained details. We propose Attention Sliced Wasserstein Pooling to preserve these fine-grained details, leading to improved omni-modal representations. OmniRet is trained on an aggregation of approximately 6 million query-target pairs spanning 30 datasets. We benchmark our model on 13 retrieval tasks and a MMEBv2 subset. Our model demonstrates significant improvements on composed query, audio and video retrieval tasks, while achieving on-par performance with state-of-the-art models on others. Furthermore, we curate a new Audio-Centric Multimodal Benchmark (ACM). This new benchmark introduces two critical, previously missing tasks-composed audio retrieval and audio-visual retrieval to more comprehensively evaluate a model's omni-modal embedding capacity.
Chuong Huynh, Manh Luong, Abhinav Shrivastava
University of Maryland, College Park, USA · Monash University, Australia
Unified multimodal embedding spaces have become the standard interface for cross-modal retrieval and multimodal RAG, and recent audio-video-text (AVT) encoders extend this setting to three modalities. Such encoders can produce a joint (T,V,A) embedding whenever all three modalities are available, but standard pairwise InfoNCE objectives leave this signal unused during training. We close this gap with fusion-as-teacher distillation, which treats a stop-gradient copy of the fused embedding as a teacher signal for the single-modal embeddings, paired with a Tuple-InfoNCE term that supervises the fused embedding directly. We instantiate this objective as OmniRetriever-7B. Across six zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, OmniRetriever-7B surpasses the closed-source Gemini Embedding 2 by 13.3-18.0 R@1 on Clotho and SoundDescs, and reaches the contemporary zero-shot specialist band of open video-text encoders on MSR-VTT and MSVD. To stress-test joint representations, we further release OmniRetriever-Bench, a 12-direction AVT retrieval benchmark totaling 3782 triples; on it OmniRetriever-7B attains AVG-all 34.84, improving over Gemini Embedding 2 by 1.72 and over the best prior open-source AVT method by 8.03.