Closing the Indexing-Decoding Gap in Multimodal Generative Retrieval via Prefix Retention Optimization

Abstract: Multimodal generative retrieval formulates multimodal retrieval as discrete identifier generation, eliminating the need for explicit similarity search over external embeddings. Existing approaches construct identifiers via residual quantization and decode them with trie-constrained beam search. This combination introduces an indexing-decoding gap: identifier learning objectives, including reconstruction and contrastive losses, do not explicitly enforce prefix discriminability during decoding. As a result, even well-optimized identifiers can be irreversibly pruned early in beam search due to low-rank prefixes. We theoretically characterize this gap and derive a survival bound that relates prefix retention to three controllable factors in indexing and decoding. Building on this bound, we propose PRO, prefix retention optimization, a unified framework comprising three mechanisms: (i) prefix ranking distillation aligns quantized prefix rankings with those induced by pre-quantization embeddings using a listwise loss; (ii) vocabulary scheduling increases codebook sizes from shallow to deep residual quantization levels to reduce early competition from non-target prefixes; and (iii) geometric score fusion vectorizes each candidate prefix and incorporates its similarity to the query into beam search scoring, further reducing the indexing-decoding mismatch. Experiments on nine multimodal retrieval tasks show that PRO improves retention of target identifier prefixes and outperforms existing multimodal generative retrieval baselines.