# ResComEmb: Effective and Efficient Multimodal Embedding via Residual Homogeneity Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37225/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Document understanding and multimodal RAG, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 43 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Document understanding and multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/document-understanding-and-multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07726/) (2024)
- [FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07783/) (2021)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [VisionZip: Longer is Better but Not Necessary in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04467/) (2024)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [Matryoshka Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13147/) (2022)
- [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)
- [ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01449/) (2024)
- [Honeybee: Locality-enhanced Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06742/) (2023)
- [TokenPacker: Efficient Visual Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02392/) (2024)
- [UniIR: Training and Benchmarking Universal Multimodal Information Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17136/) (2023)
- [Stop Looking for Important Tokens in Multimodal Language Models: Duplication Matters More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11494/) (2025)
- [Deep Image Retrieval: Learning global representations for image search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01325/) (2016)
- [E5-V: Universal Embeddings with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12580/) (2024)
- [ONE-PEACE: Exploring One General Representation Model Toward Unlimited Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11172/) (2023)
- [MagicLens: Self-Supervised Image Retrieval with Open-Ended Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19651/) (2024)
- [VLM2Vec-V2: Advancing Multimodal Embedding for Videos, Images, and Visual Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04590/) (2025)
- [Unifying Multimodal Retrieval via Document Screenshot Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11251/) (2024)
- [LamRA: Large Multimodal Model as Your Advanced Retrieval Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01720/) (2024)
- [MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis For Universal Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14475/) (2024)
- [SoftSort: A Continuous Relaxation for the argsort Operator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16038/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for universal multimodal representation learning. However, existing methods either compress each input into a single vector, limiting fine-grained expressiveness, or retain long sequences of visual-token vectors, incurring substantial storage and interaction costs. To resolve this trade-off, we propose ResComEmb, a trainable framework for effective and efficient universal multi-vector multimodal embedding. ResComEmb first encodes each input at native dynamic resolution into ordered global, intermediate, and fine-grained views. After MLLM contextualization and embedding projection, a trainable Residual Homogeneity Compression (RHC) module reduces within-granularity redundancy and cross-granularity repetition under explicit visual token budgets. Then, ResComEmb introduces a length-adaptive Bidirectional Late-Interaction Matching mechanism for robust query-document scoring, which averages the strongest token-level matches in each direction and combines the two scores using a weight based on how many valid tokens each side has. Extensive experiments on MMEB, ViDoRe V1, and ViDoRe V2 show that ResComEmb produces higher-quality universal multimodal embeddings than VLM2Vec-V2, and outperforms ColQwen2.5 in visual document retrieval using only 37.5% of its full visual token budget, demonstrating a favorable effectiveness-efficiency trade-off.