arXiv:2607. 23052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dual-encoder vision-language models (VLMs) expose a similarity interface that enables zero-shot retrieval but fails compositional constraints: queries like "umbrella and no person" retrieve images containing both, even when concept detection is reliable.
By Sultan Alshehri, Zhantao Yang, Han Zhang, Marios Savvides
The paper introduces GradCIR, a method for training composed image retrieval (CIR) systems on graded relevance rather than binary relevance. It uses a vision‑language model to generate queries and 4‑level relevance labels, an iterative feedback loop to mine hard negatives, and a hierarchy‑aware angular objective to directly optimize graded labels. Experiments on a Walmart catalog and FashionIQ show significant NDCG improvements and the system is deployed in Walmart’s live visual‑search traffic.
By Anubhav Gupta, Hrushikesh Mohapatra, Prijith Chandra, Asish Mohapatra, Anuj Garg, Arvind Maan, Sudip Datta, Venkat Bulusu, Sitesh Kumar Jalan
Visual search on large e-commerce catalogs must serve both "similarity" queries that ask for items resembling an uploaded image and "modifier" queries that comprise an image and text describing a desi...
CORE improves compositional reasoning in multimodal language models by distilling a cross‑attentive reranker’s fine‑grained judgments into the embedding model. It generates candidate lists across five compositional matching levels and trains with a Rank‑KL objective to replicate the reranker’s ranking. Experiments on COLA, SUGARCREPE++, and NEGBENCH show CORE‑RERANKER‑8B outperforms Jina‑Reranker by 10.7 points, while CORE‑EMBED‑8B achieves the best overall average among evaluated embeddings, with gains also transferring to the MCMR benchmark without harming COCO or Flickr30K retrieval.
By Tingyu Song, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Chu Liu, Pengjun Xie, Yilun Zhao, Shu Wu
arXiv:2606. 31222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Composed image retrieval requires identifying a target image from a gallery by integrating a reference image with a textual modification instruction.
By Gunho Jung, Jeong-Woo Park, Seon Bin Kim, Seong-Whan Lee
The paper introduces CERES, a closed‑loop multimodal indexing framework that addresses semantic collapse in multimodal generation by building a three‑level semantic pyramid and using scale‑routed cross‑attention to generate images that remain retrievable by their original queries. CERES employs a co‑occurrence‑aware router, a lightweight U‑Net generator, and a soft‑Jaccard coverage objective to ensure generated images cover the intended concepts, verified by re‑indexing with a frozen vision‑language model and an external DINOv2 probe. Experiments on four pansharpening benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, especially under extreme scale variation, and significant improvements in concept‑query retrieval and image‑text ranking metrics.
By Guangyuan Dong, Chuang Liu, Haoyu Wang, Yangchen Zeng, Jiaqi Zhang, Li Jiuxing, Xiaoyang Yu, Pinlong Zhao, Yuchao Hou, Ziwei Li, Zheng Lin, Alexander Lim Han Yang, Yusen Wu
Visual document retrieval is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, aiming to identify query-relevant pages from document collections where evidence is distributed across t...
arXiv:2608.15698v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Visual document retrieval is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, aiming to identify query-relevant pages from docume...
By Chunyi Peng, Zhipeng Xu, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Shi Yu, Sen Mei, Yubo Sun, Yongheng Zhang, Jie Zhou, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
arXiv:2609.08188v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) augmented with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) benefit from access to external evidence. However, standard retriever...
By Zhan-Lun Chang, Dong-Jun Han, Seyyedali Hosseinalipour, Mung Chiang, Christopher G. Brinton
arXiv:2609.14100v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Fashion Image Captioning (FIC) plays a vital role in enhancing user experience and product search in e-commerce platforms. Unlike natural scene image...
By Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri, Shreya Shukla, Anand Mishra
The paper introduces Preserve-and-Compose Training (PACT) for composed image retrieval, a task where a query image is modified by a textual instruction while preserving visual content from a reference image. PACT learns from image–text–text triplets, using target captions for supervision and visual evidence from the source image to maintain relevant details, without requiring target images or gallery updates. The authors also propose Chord scoring, which blends target similarity with source-relative directional agreement in a frozen image space, and demonstrate that this combined approach yields strong retrieval performance across multiple zero-shot CIR benchmarks and various backbones.
By Sehyun Kwon
arXiv:2609.12965v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text-based person search (TBPS) aims to retrieve images of a target person from a large image gallery based on a given natural language description. Mo...
By Mang Ye, Yucheng Ji, Yang Bai, Min Cao, Siyuan Chai, Bo Du, Min Zhang