Reproducibility I: Recommender Systems

ultimodal recommendation has emerged as a mainstream paradigm, typically leveraging text and visual embeddings extracted from pre-trained models such as Sentence-BERT, Vision Transformers, and ResNet. This approach is founded on the intuitive assumption that incorporating multimodal embeddings can enhance recommendation performance. However, despite its popularity, this assumption lacks comprehensive empirical verification. This presents a critical research gap. To address it, we pose the central research question of this paper: Are multimodal embeddings truly beneficial for recommendation?