Learning to Compose: Revisiting Proxy Task Design for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval
arXiv:2607. 00374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a textual modification.
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.
arXiv:2607. 00374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a textual modification.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 07032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image based on a query composed of a reference image and a relative caption without training samples.
arXiv:2606. 07451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models such as CLIP are highly useful for diverse tasks due to their shared image-text embedding space.
Traditional image captioning methods often struggle to generate comprehensive, context-rich descriptions, especially for details not directly observable from visual cues. To overcome this, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented image captioning framework that generates captions with deeper insights, such as object attributes, event context, and underlying significance, by leveraging external knowledge.
Automatic evaluation of image and video captioning is essential for benchmarking multimodal systems, although standard evaluation metrics show limited alignment with human judgments. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs), commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-Judge, have improved alignment with human judgments but still suffer from a mismatch between large-vocabulary language modeling and evaluation over a small label set.
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.
arXiv:2607. 22919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal embedding spaces in models like CLIP enable powerful capabilities such as semantic similarity retrieval and cross-modal zero-shot classification.
Current instruction-based image retrieval systems are powerful but limited to single-turn interactions, failing to capture the iterative nature of complex, real-world visual searches. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contextual Composed Image Retrieval (CoCo-IR), a novel task that enables users to progressively refine search results through interactions.
Adapting CLIP for zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) via prompt learning faces a fundamental tension: the model must bridge the sketch-photo domain gap through task-specific adaptation, yet the added flexibility risks overfitting to seen training categories and eroding CLIP's zero-shot generalization. We present SeCo-SBIR, a semantically consistent prompt learning framework that resolves this tension from both sides.
arXiv:2511. 01390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-grained cross-modal alignment aims to establish precise local correspondences between vision and language, forming a cornerstone for visual question answering and related multimodal applications.