# MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis For Universal Multimodal Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14475 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14475/

## Key facts

- Cited by 84 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Self-improving MLLMs and synthetic data, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs.
- Builds on 37 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Self-improving MLLMs and synthetic data](https://mlsanity.com/synth/self-improving-mllms-and-synthetic-data/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09741/) (2022)
- [Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00368/) (2023)
- [VisRAG: Vision-based Retrieval-augmented Generation on Multi-modality Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10594/) (2024)
- [VLM2Vec: Training Vision-Language Models for Massive Multimodal Embedding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05160/) (2024)
- [MM-Embed: Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02571/) (2024)
- [E5-V: Universal Embeddings with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12580/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12561/) (2022)
- [MagicLens: Self-Supervised Image Retrieval with Open-Ended Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19651/) (2024)
- [Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09260/) (2022)
- [Vision-by-Language for Training-Free Compositional Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09291/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [Qwen3-VL-Embedding and Qwen3-VL-Reranker: A Unified Framework for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Retrieval and Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04720/) (2026)
- [mmE5: Improving Multimodal Multilingual Embeddings via High-quality Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08468/) (2025)
- [Ask in Any Modality: A Comprehensive Survey on Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08826/) (2025)
- [Think Then Embed: Generative Context Improves Multimodal Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05014/) (2025)
- [MetaEmbed: Scaling Multimodal Retrieval at Test-Time with Flexible Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18095/) (2025)
- [UME-R1: Exploring Reasoning-Driven Generative Multimodal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00405/) (2025)
- [Video-XL-2: Towards Very Long-Video Understanding Through Task-Aware KV Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19225/) (2025)
- [MemVerse: Multimodal Memory for Lifelong Learning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03627/) (2025)
- [RzenEmbed: Towards Comprehensive Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27350/) (2025)
- [Breaking the Batch Barrier (B3) of Contrastive Learning via Smart Batch Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11293/) (2025)
- [Modality Curation: Building Universal Embeddings for Advanced Multimodal Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19650/) (2025)
- [Embed-RL: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Multimodal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13823/) (2026)
- [MoCa: Modality-aware Continual Pre-training Makes Better Bidirectional Multimodal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23115/) (2025)
- [Visual-RAG: Benchmarking Text-to-Image Retrieval Augmented Generation for Visual Knowledge Intensive Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16636/) (2025)
- [MomentSeeker: A Task-Oriented Benchmark For Long-Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12558/) (2025)
- [Retrv-R1: A Reasoning-Driven MLLM Framework for Universal and Efficient Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02745/) (2025)
- [MC-Search: Evaluating and Enhancing Multimodal Agentic Search with Structured Long Reasoning Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00873/) (2026)
- [PLUME: Latent Reasoning Based Universal Multimodal Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02073/) (2026)
- [Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19549/) (2026)
- [Towards Universal Video Retrieval: Generalizing Video Embedding via Synthesized Multimodal Pyramid Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27571/) (2025)
- [Reasoning Guided Embeddings: Leveraging MLLM Reasoning for Improved Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16150/) (2025)
- [Any Information Is Just Worth One Single Screenshot: Unifying Search With Visualized Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11431/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Multimodal RAG through a Chart-based Document Question-Answering Generation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14864/) (2025)
- [FreeRet: MLLMs as Training-Free Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24621/) (2025)
- [ReMatch: Boosting Representation through Matching for Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19278/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19961/) (2026)
- [WeMM-Embedding: WeChat Multi-Modal Embedding Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24053/) (2026)
- [M2IO-R1: An Efficient RL-Enhanced Reasoning Framework for Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06328/) (2025)
- [MR2-Bench: Going Beyond Matching to Reasoning in Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26378/) (2025)
- [TRACE: Task-Adaptive Reasoning and Representation Learning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02929/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the rapidly growing demand for multimodal retrieval, progress in this field remains severely constrained by a lack of training data. In this paper, we introduce MegaPairs, a novel data synthesis method that leverages vision language models (VLMs) and open-domain images, together with a massive synthetic dataset generated from this method. Our empirical analysis shows that MegaPairs generates high-quality data, enabling the multimodal retriever to significantly outperform the baseline model trained on 70× more data from existing datasets. Moreover, since MegaPairs solely relies on general image corpora and open-source VLMs, it can be easily scaled up, enabling continuous improvements in retrieval performance. In this stage, we produced more than 26 million training instances and trained several models of varying sizes using this data. These new models achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across 4 popular composed image retrieval (CIR) benchmarks and the highest overall performance on the 36 datasets provided by MMEB. They also demonstrate notable performance improvements with additional downstream fine-tuning. Our produced dataset, well-trained models, and data synthesis pipeline will be made publicly available to facilitate the future development of this field.