FreeRet: MLLMs as Training-Free Retrievers 事件

FreeRet: MLLMs as Training-Free Retrievers arXiv:2509.24621v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are emerging as versatile foundations for mixed-modality retrieval. Yet, they often require heavy post-hoc training to convert them into contrastive encoders for retrieval. This work asks: Can off-the-shelf MLLMs serve as powerful retrievers without additional training? We present FreeRet, a plug-and-play framework that turns any MLLM into a two-stage retriever