ProUIE: A Macro-to-Micro Progressive Learning Method for LLM-based Universal Information Extraction

LLM-based universal information extraction (UIE) methods often rely on additional information beyond the original training data, which increases training complexity yet often yields limited gains. To address this, we propose ProUIE, a Macro-to-Micro progressive learning approach that improves UIE without introducing any external information. ProUIE consists of three stages: (i) macro-level Complete Modeling (CM), which learns NER, RE, and EE along their intrinsic difficulty order on the full training data to build a unified extraction foundation, (ii) meso-level Streamlined Alignment (SA), which operates on sampled data with simplified target formats, streamlining and regularizing structured outputs to make them more concise and controllable, and (iii) micro-level Deep Exploration (DE), which applies GRPO with stepwise fine-grained rewards (SFR) over structural units to guide exploration and improve performance. Experiments on 36 public datasets show that ProUIE consistently improves unified extraction, outperforming strong instruction-tuned baselines on average for NER and RE while using a smaller backbone, and it further demonstrates clear gains in large-scale production-oriented information extraction.

Unified Multimodal and Multilingual Retrieval via Multi-Task Learning with NLU Integration

Multimodal retrieval systems typically employ Vision Language Models (VLMs) that encode images and text independently into vectors within a shared embedding space. Despite incorporating text encoders, VLMs consistently underperform specialized text models on text-only retrieval tasks. Moreover, introducing additional text encoders increases storage, inference overhead, and exacerbates retrieval inefficiencies, especially in multilingual settings. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-task learning framework that unifies the feature representation across images, long and short texts, and intent-rich queries. To our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly optimize multilingual image retrieval, text retrieval, and natural language understanding (NLU) tasks within a single framework. Our approach integrates image and text retrieval with a shared text encoder that is enhanced by NLU features for intent understanding and retrieval accuracy.