aiqbench analysis
The paper proposes training multimodal embeddings that change their grouping based on a natural-language instruction, so the same product set can be clustered by color, material, or both. It uses supervised contrastive learning and HDBSCAN, which avoids specifying the cluster count in advance. The reported gains over a general-purpose embedding baseline (95.01 vs. 53.06 mean V-measure) come from the authors' own product benchmark, so they need independent replication before the margin is treated as a general result.
CIM-Embed: Learning Instruction-Conditioned Multimodal Embeddings for Clustering
arXiv:2610.21805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal objects can require different partitions under different instructions, as when products in an e-commerce catalog are grouped by color, material, or both. Retrieval-oriented embeddings may not recover these partitions, while generative clustering often relies on intermediate descriptions or iterative decisions. This paper presents CIM-Embed, a framework for learning instruction-conditioned multimodal embeddings for clustering. Supervised contrastive learning uses same-group positives and negatives from other groups, optionally including other tasks; heterogeneous structured batches accommodate tasks with different group counts. At inference, the model maps each object's image, text, and instruction directly to an embedding; HDBSCAN then forms a partition without the ground-truth cluster count. We construct ProductMIC from product metadata in Amazon Reviews 2023, comprising training data and an evaluation benchmark for instruction-conditioned clustering. The benchmark contains 5,373 products and 449 single-attribute and compositional grouping tasks spanning 50 leaf categories excluded from our training. With full-dimensional embeddings and HDBSCAN, direct within-task SupCon training achieves a mean per-task V-measure of 95.01, compared with 53.06 for WeMM 9B, the strongest general-purpose embedding baseline evaluated. Frozen product-trained encoders also improve out-of-domain conditional grouping, while controlled transfer experiments distinguish partition transfer from instruction response. We will release the code and dataset upon acceptance.
Abstract:Multimodal objects can require different partitions under different instructions, as when products in an e-commerce catalog are grouped by color, material, or both. Retrieval-oriented embeddings may not recover these partitions, while generative clustering often relies on intermediate descriptions or iterative decisions. This paper presents CIM-Embed, a framework for learning instruction-conditioned multimodal embeddings for clustering. Supervised contrastive learning uses same-group positives and negatives from other groups, optionally including other tasks; heterogeneous structured batches accommodate tasks with different group counts. At inference, the model maps each object's image, text, and instruction directly to an embedding; HDBSCAN then forms a partition without the ground-truth cluster count. We construct ProductMIC from product metadata in Amazon Reviews 2023, comprising training data and an evaluation benchmark for instruction-conditioned clustering. The benchmark contains 5,373 products and 449 single-attribute and compositional grouping tasks spanning 50 leaf categories excluded from our training. With full-dimensional embeddings and HDBSCAN, direct within-task SupCon training achieves a mean per-task V-measure of 95.01, compared with 53.06 for WeMM 9B, the strongest general-purpose embedding baseline evaluated. Frozen product-trained encoders also improve out-of-domain conditional grouping, while controlled transfer experiments distinguish partition transfer from instruction response. We will release the code and dataset upon acceptance.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2610.21805 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2610.21805v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21805 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 295 words
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