Cross Modal Retrieval Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
Cross Modal Retrieval and Alignment Patents: Filing Trends and Leading Assignees
Concentrated at the top. Five assignees hold 57.8% of all 64 records in scope, with a long tail of single-filing entrants below tenth place. Filings rose from 6 in 2021 to 10 in 2024, a 67% increase, with 2025 the peak observed year at 20 records. The apparent fall in 2026 reflects the roughly 18-month gap between filing and publication, not a slowdown in filing activity.
- 1THE GENERAL HOSPITAL CORP12
- 2SNAP INC8
- 3GOOGLE LLC7
- 4SIEMENS AG7
- 5MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING LLC3
See the full cross modal retrieval and alignment analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions on cross modal retrieval patents
What counts as a cross modal retrieval and alignment patent?
These are filings that describe mapping two or more modalities, such as image and text, into a shared embedding space so that a query in one modality can retrieve matches in another. The dataset behind this page specifically targets filings that combine that retrieval or alignment concept with training mechanics like contrastive pretraining, negative sampling or zero-shot transfer. This excludes filings that merely mention multimodal data in passing without claiming the matching mechanism itself.
Who holds the most patents in cross modal retrieval and alignment?
The ranked list covers 37 companies, with the leading assignee holding 12 of the 64 records in scope. That lead narrows quickly: by fifth place the count drops to 3 records, and the top 5 combined hold 57.8% of all records. Below tenth place, most of the remaining assignees hold only one or two filings each, which is typical of a technology area still attracting new entrants.
Is filing activity in this area growing or slowing down?
Filing activity grew from 6 records in 2021 to 10 in 2024, a 67% increase over that three-year span, and 2024 is the most recent year that can be treated as a complete publication cohort. The apparent decline in 2025 and 2026 figures is an artefact of publication lag, since patent applications typically take around 18 months to publish after filing. Readers should treat any 2025-2026 count as a floor, not a ceiling.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Cross Modal Retrieval and Alignment covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.