UEmbed: Unified Sparse and Dense Multimodal Embeddings

Sparse retrieval underpins modern search systems, from web search to retrieval-augmented generation.

Sparse retrieval underpins modern search systems, from web search to retrieval-augmented generation. Existing work has introduced Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) to push beyond exact lexical matching toward richer semantics. Yet LSR has so far remained tied to encoder-style…