Alibaba-NLP releases UEmbed-2B, a multimodal model producing dense and sparse embeddings

Alibaba-NLP's UEmbed-2B, a decoder-only multimodal embedding model built on Qwen3.5 2B, produces both dense and SPLADE-style sparse embeddings from a single forward pass. It supports text, image, video, and mixed-modal inputs for retrieval, and the 4B and 9B variants are also available. The team reports state-of-the-art results on the text and agent tracks of MMEB-v3.