Alibaba NLP releases Core-Embed multimodal embedding models for compositional retrieval

Alibaba NLP has released core-emb-2b and core-emb-8b, multimodal embedding models built on Qwen3-VL that distill reranker judgments to better match attribute-object bindings in text and image retrieval.

The Core-Embed-8B model posts the best total average (0.666) among evaluated embedding models on compositional benchmarks, 5.7 points above its VL-Emb-8B backbone.

Companion Core-Reranker-2B and 8B models are also available, with the 8B reranker reaching 82.7% total average on the same benchmarks.