# Lens: Bringing the Right Semantic Perspective into Focus for Training-Free Multimodal Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20252 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20252/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05961/) (2024)
- [VLM2Vec: Training Vision-Language Models for Massive Multimodal Embedding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05160/) (2024)
- [E5-V: Universal Embeddings with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12580/) (2024)
- [MagicLens: Self-Supervised Image Retrieval with Open-Ended Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19651/) (2024)
- [LamRA: Large Multimodal Model as Your Advanced Retrieval Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01720/) (2024)
- [Scaling Sentence Embeddings with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16645/) (2023)
- [MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis For Universal Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14475/) (2024)
- [Breaking the Modality Barrier: Universal Embedding Learning with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17432/) (2025)
- [Repetition Improves Language Model Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15449/) (2024)
- [N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13327/) (2021)
- [Meta-Task Prompting Elicits Embeddings from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18458/) (2024)
- [FreeRet: MLLMs as Training-Free Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24621/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-quality representations are essential for a wide range of downstream tasks. Dedicated embedding models are explicitly optimized for representation learning, yet their training data are often more limited in scale and diversity than the massive corpora used to pretrain modern large language models and multimodal large language models. Large-scale pretraining and instruction following enable autoregressive models to select relevant evidence, integrate multimodal information, and infer semantics under different task perspectives, creating a distinctive opportunity for training-free representation learning. However, our analysis reveals that existing semantic-elicitation methods do not reliably orient the extracted states toward the semantic perspective required by the downstream task. Consequently, the resulting representations often remain dominated by salient input content. We characterize this problem as semantic perspective misalignment and propose Lens, a training-free framework that makes representation readout task-directed. Semantic Perspective Anchoring associates the task-required perspective with a task-specific readout phrase, specifying the interpretive role of the positions later used for extraction. Contextualized Phrase Readout places the same phrase after the complete input and aggregates its token states, combining full-context access with the anchored perspective. The resulting representation reflects task-conditioned evidence integration and inference rather than a generic summary of salient content. Without parameter updates, architectural modification, or reranking, Lens achieves an overall Precision@1 of 63.9 across all 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the closest same-backbone training-free embedding baseline by 10.2 points.