Alibaba NLP releases UEmbed-9B, a unified sparse and dense multimodal embedding model

Alibaba NLP has released UEmbed-9B, a decoder-only multimodal embedding model built on Qwen3.5 9B that outputs both dense and SPLADE-style sparse embeddings from one forward pass. It supports text, image, video, and mixed-modal inputs for retrieval and multimodal search, and the family also includes 2B and 4B variants. The model is available on Hugging Face, with transformers and vLLM inference support.