What Matters for Grocery Product Retrieval with Open Source Vision Language Models

Emmanuel G. Maminta; Rowel O. Atienza

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arXiv · 2605.18029

What Matters for Grocery Product Retrieval with Open Source Vision Language Models

Emmanuel G. Maminta·Rowel O. Atienza

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Abstract

Multimodal product retrieval (MPR) underpins checkout-free retail and automated inventory systems, yet it demands fine-grained SKU discrimination that standard vision-language benchmarks fail to capture. We present the first systematic zero-shot evaluation of 190 open-source VLMs on the MPR task of the GroceryVision Challenge, isolating pre-training data, architecture, and input resolution. Our analysis yields three actionable findings. \textbf{(1) Data quality trumps scale.} Switching from raw web-scrapes to filtered datasets delivers up to 16.6\% accuracy gains, exceeding the benefit of doubling model parameters. \textbf{(2) Efficient models can win.} MobileCLIP-B (150M parameters) outperforms 351M counterparts trained on noisy data. We introduce \textit{semantic power density} ($\phi$), an efficiency metric that penalizes sub-threshold accuracy. \textbf{(3) A precision gap persists.} State-of-the-art models achieve 94.5\% Recall@5 but suffer a 17.5\% drop at Recall@1, revealing that contrastive embeddings cluster categories effectively but fail to rank visually similar SKUs. Code and evaluation scripts are available at \url{https://github.com/upeee/openmpr}.

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BibTeX RIS

Emmanuel G. Maminta, Rowel O. Atienza. 2026-05-18. What Matters for Grocery Product Retrieval with Open Source Vision Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18029

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