Abstract: Examples of the present disclosure describe systems and methods for content-based multimedia retrieval with attention-enabled local focus. In aspects, a search query comprising multimedia content may be received by a search system. A first semantic embedding representation of the multimedia content may be generated. The first semantic embedding representation may be compared to a stored set of candidate semantic embedding representations of other multimedia content. Based on the comparison, one or more candidate representations that are visually similar to the first semantic embedding representation may be selected from the stored set of candidate semantic embedding representations. The candidate representations may be ranked, and top ‘N’ candidate representations (or corresponding multimedia items) may be retrieved and provided as search results for the search query.