TTE-Flash: Accelerating Reasoning-based Multimodal Representations via Think-Then-Embed Tokens

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 15 May 2026] TTE-Flash: Accelerating Reasoning-based Multimodal Representations via Think-Then-Embed Tokens Jianpeng Cheng, Xian Wu, Jiangfan Zhang, Wentao Bao, Chaitanya Ahuja, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Hanchao Yu, Yang Gao, Fan Xia, Qi Guo, Shaodan Zhai, Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao Recent research has demonstrated that Universal Multimodal Embedding (UME) benefits significantly from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In this paradigm, a generative model produces explicit reasoning traces for a multimodal query, with the final representation extracted from an <eos> embedding token attending to both the query and the reasoning. Despite its effectiveness, the computational overhead of generating explicit CoT traces is often prohibitive. In this work, we propose replacing explicit CoT with latent think tokens, which are interpreted as latent variables that can produce explicit CoT traces as observed variables. By optimizing think tokens using CoT generation loss and subsequent embedding tokens using contrastive loss, we produce high-performance, reasoning-aware representations at a constant inference cost. Our study investigates two key architectural designs: 1) how think and embeddings tokens should be extracted from the same LLM backbone. 2) how the tokens should be trained as two dependent tasks. We introduce TTE-Flash-2B, a reasoning-aware multimodal representation model that outperforms its explicit-CoT counterpart on the MMEB-v2 benchmark, while producing latent think tokens that are interpretable both textually and visually. Furthermore, zero-shot evaluation across 15 video datasets reveals scaling behavior as the number of think tokens increases, and motivating a pilot study of adaptive think budget allocation based on task requirements. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.16638 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.16638v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16638 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Xian Wu [view email] [v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 21:10:56 UTC (42,978 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)