# TRACE: Task-Adaptive Reasoning and Representation Learning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02929 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02929/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 51 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (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)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [DreamSim: Learning New Dimensions of Human Visual Similarity using Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09344/) (2023)
- [Scaling Language-Image Pre-training via Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00794/) (2022)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [Image Retrieval on Real-life Images with Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04024/) (2021)
- [Composing Text and Image for Image Retrieval - An Empirical Odyssey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07119/) (2018)
- [VLM2Vec: Training Vision-Language Models for Massive Multimodal Embedding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05160/) (2024)
- [Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14283/) (2023)
- [Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11713/) (2023)
- [Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15402/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval with Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15247/) (2023)
- [GME: Improving Universal Multimodal Retrieval by Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16855/) (2024)
- [UniIR: Training and Benchmarking Universal Multimodal Information Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17136/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [PLUME: Latent Reasoning Based Universal Multimodal Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02073/) (2026)
- [MOON3.0: Reasoning-aware Multimodal Representation Learning for E-commerce Product Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00513/) (2026)
- [Douyin Multimodal Embedding Model Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02148/) (2026)
- [ReLoop-UME: Recurrent Depth with Learnable Retrieval Registers for Universal Multimodal Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28751/) (2026)
- [PailitaoGR: Latent Think-with-Images for Generative Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26658/) (2026)
- [Is Reasoning Always Useful? Rethinking Reasoning Utility in Universal Multimodal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29560/) (2026)
- [Autoregressive Retriever: Improving Query Understanding from Item Feedback for Universal Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11666/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Universal Multimodal Retrieval requires unified embedding models capable of interpreting diverse user intents, ranging from simple keywords to complex compositional instructions. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess strong reasoning capabilities, prevailing adaptations confine them to static encoders, underutilizing their generative potential. This encoder-only paradigm struggles with complex intents that demand logical deduction rather than superficial pattern matching. To address this, we introduce TRACE (Task-adaptive Reasoning And Compressing Embeddings). TRACE unifies generative reasoning with discriminative representation learning. It first generates a structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to explicitly reason about the query, and subsequently compresses this reasoning trace into a compact embedding via a dedicated token. To train this framework, we construct M-BEIR-CoT, a large-scale dataset featuring a difficulty-aware routing strategy. Experiments on the M-BEIR benchmark establish TRACE as the new state-of-the-art. Crucially, TRACE demonstrates a learned implicit routing behavior. It autonomously activates reasoning for complex queries while bypassing it for simpler ones, achieving an optimal balance between retrieval accuracy and inference throughput. Furthermore, by internalizing the deductive process, TRACE exhibits remarkable zero-shot transferability to unseen domains and novel constraints.