Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image by editing a reference image with a natural-language instruction, without relying on domain-specific annotated triplets. Most existing ZS-CIR methods rely on textual inversion to translate the reference image into pseudo-text tokens and then compose them with the instruction via simple concatenation in the text space, which can be lossy and brittle for fine-grained semantics.
Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image from a multimodal query consisting of a reference image and an edit text describing the desired modification. Recent ZS-CIR studies have relied on projection-based methods that map a reference image into pseudo-word tokens in the text embedding space.
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:2609.10008v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Composed video retrieval (CoVR) searches a gallery for the target video that realizes a natural-language modification of a source clip. However, at gal...
By Dmitry Demidov, Muhammad Zaigham Zaheer, Omkar Thawakar, Abdelrahman Mohamed Shaker, Rao Anwer
arXiv:2609.37426v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising results in long-video understanding due to the rich semantic information they can capture....
By Arka Mukherjee, Kaleen Shrestha, Larissa Zhu, Maja Matari\'c
G2D is a training‑free framework that combines a discriminative model (CLIP) for broad candidate retrieval with a generative vision‑language model for fine‑grained, image‑grounded verification. By using CLIP’s top‑K shortlist and a structured prior from candidate names and probabilities, G2D focuses generative reasoning on uncertain samples, employing fixed confidence routing, entropy‑adaptive candidate sizing, and trie‑constrained decoding to produce a single valid output. Across eight benchmarks, G2D achieves an average accuracy of 68.85%, outperforming both CLIP (59.35%) and the standalone generative model (63.11%), and it also transfers effectively to other models such as DCLIP, WaffleCLIP, and CuPL.
arXiv:2509.22650v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Most existing approaches to referring segmentation achieve strong performance only through fine-tuning or by composing multiple pre-trained models,...
By Anna Kukleva, Enis Simsar, Alessio Tonioni, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Jan Eric Lenssen, Bernt Schiele
The paper introduces G2D, a training‑free framework that combines a discriminative model (CLIP) for broad candidate retrieval with a generative vision‑language model for fine‑grained, image‑grounded verification. By using CLIP’s top‑K shortlist and a structured prior from candidate names and probabilities, G2D focuses generative reasoning on uncertain samples, achieving an average accuracy of 68.85% across eight benchmarks—higher than both CLIP alone (59.35%) and the standalone generative model (63.11%). The approach also adapts to various generator configurations and extends to other models such as DCLIP, WaffleCLIP, and CuPL.
By Zehua Hao, Fang Liu, Qinliang Wang, Yaoyang Du, Xinyan Huang, Puhua Chen
arXiv:2606. 25237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop accurate and efficient solutions for large-scale retrieval tasks where novel (zero-shot) items can arrive continuously at a rapid pace.
By Sachin Yadav, Deepak Saini, Anirudh Buvanesh, Bhawna Paliwal, Kunal Dahiya, Siddarth Asokan, Yashoteja Prabhu, Jian Jiao, Manik Varma
The paper introduces SRAIN, a framework that learns sample‑wise, rank‑aware interpolation weights for composed visual data retrieval. Instead of relying on complex multimodal large language models, SRAIN uses simple linear interpolation in embedding space, dynamically predicting query‑specific weights through batch‑wise rank‑aware estimation and a compact memory bank for hard negatives. This approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on composed video retrieval and competitive results on composed image retrieval while significantly reducing query‑time latency.
By Boseung Jeong, Taegyu Park, Donghyeon Kwon, Hyunsouk Cho, Suha Kwak
arXiv:2607. 00374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a textual modification.
By Jingjing Zhang, Lei Zhang, Zheren Fu, Zhendong Mao
The paper introduces Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation (ITA) for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR), a task that seeks untrimmed videos containing moments relevant to a text query. ITA employs a Backbone-Internal Temporal Adaptation that lets the final visual transformer layers attend to neighboring frames, creating temporally aware embeddings while keeping CLIP frozen. Additionally, an Affinity-Weighted Gradient Propagation technique softly aggregates top‑k frames based on text‑frame affinities to better handle the weakly supervised nature of PRVR, leading to state‑of‑the‑art performance and more accurate frame‑level evidence retrieval.
By Hyun Seok Seong, Woojin Jun, SuBeen Lee, Jae-Pil Heo