AMBER: Multi-View Adaptive Budget Allocation for Listwise Vision-Language Reranking

arXiv:2610.02831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful listwise rerankers for multimodal retrieval, but high inference costs restrict them to evaluating small local candidate views. Existing multi-call strategies rely on fixed schedules, wasting expensive VLM calls on uninformative candidate pairs and easy queries. To address this, we propose Adaptive Multi-view Budgeted Elo Reranking (AMBER), an online, budgeted multi-view reranking framework that dynamically optimizes global resource allocation. AMBER treats fragmented listwise VLM outputs as local tournaments, using continuous Elo updates to maintain a lightweight global ranking state. Building on this, it allocates computation at two levels: dynamically constructing candidate views with high score ambiguity, and scheduling queries to maximize expected information gain. We show that each Elo update corresponds to a stochastic gradient ascent step on the Bradley-Terry log-likelihood, and provide a submodular information-theoretic motivation for the query-level allocation strategy. Experiments on CIRR, CIRCO, and PhotoBench demonstrate that AMBER achieves the strongest overall performance among the compared multi-call VLM reranking methods under comparable VLM-call budgets, while remaining effective in lower-budget settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wnlfc/AMBER.

Abstract:Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful listwise rerankers for multimodal retrieval, but high inference costs restrict them to evaluating small local candidate views. Existing multi-call strategies rely on fixed schedules, wasting expensive VLM calls on uninformative candidate pairs and easy queries. To address this, we propose Adaptive Multi-view Budgeted Elo Reranking (AMBER), an online, budgeted multi-view reranking framework that dynamically optimizes global resource allocation. AMBER treats fragmented listwise VLM outputs as local tournaments, using continuous Elo updates to maintain a lightweight global ranking state. Building on this, it allocates computation at two levels: dynamically constructing candidate views with high score ambiguity, and scheduling queries to maximize expected information gain. We show that each Elo update corresponds to a stochastic gradient ascent step on the Bradley-Terry log-likelihood, and provide a submodular information-theoretic motivation for the query-level allocation strategy. Experiments on CIRR, CIRCO, and PhotoBench demonstrate that AMBER achieves the strongest overall performance among the compared multi-call VLM reranking methods under comparable VLM-call budgets, while remaining effective in lower-budget settings. Our code is publicly available at this https URL.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.02831 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.02831v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.02831 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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AMBER: Multi-View Adaptive Budget Allocation for Listwise Vision-Language Reranking

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