# FITRep: Attention-Guided Item Representation via MLLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21389 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21389/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [Harnessing Multimodal Large Language Models for Multimodal Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09698/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online platforms usually suffer from user experience degradation due to near-duplicate items with similar visuals and text. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable multimodal embedding, existing methods treat representations as black boxes, ignoring structural relationships (e.g., primary vs. auxiliary elements), leading to local structural collapse problem. To address this, inspired by Feature Integration Theory (FIT), we propose FITRep, the first attention-guided, white-box item representation framework for fine-grained item deduplication. FITRep consists of: (1) Concept Hierarchical Information Extraction (CHIE), using MLLMs to extract hierarchical semantic concepts; (2) Structure-Preserving Dimensionality Reduction (SPDR), an adaptive UMAP-based method for efficient information compression; and (3) FAISS-Based Clustering (FBC), a FAISS-based clustering that assigns each item a unique cluster id using FAISS. Deployed on Meituan's advertising system, FITRep achieves +3.60% CTR and +4.25% CPM gains in online A/B tests, demonstrating both effectiveness and real-world impact.