arXiv Computer Vision

CertEx: Exact Visual Retrieval at Scale by Certified Exclusion

CertEx introduces a GPU‑based exact k‑nearest‑neighbor search that relies on certified exclusion, a technique that conservatively eliminates vectors using low‑precision bounds before computing exact distances. By storing a half‑precision lower‑bounding projection and embedding a rounding certificate into the tensor‑core dot product, CertEx only evaluates distances for a small subset of candidates, guaranteeing exact results. Experiments on sixteen datasets with up to 100 million vectors show that CertEx achieves 7.1× to 18.0× the throughput of the fastest cuVS search on an H100 and outperforms quantized and graph indexes when exactness is required.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Panorama: Fast-Track Nearest Neighbors

arXiv:2510. 00566v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Approximate Nearest-Neighbor Search (ANNS) pipelines for high-dimensional neural embeddings spend the bulk of their query time in candidate verification, making it the primary bottleneck in the search process.

By Vansh Ramani, Alexis Schlomer, Akash Nayar, Sayan Ranu, Jignesh M. Patel, Panagiotis Karras
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Calibrating Retrieval Geometry: Reliability-Guided Training-Free Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition

The paper introduces TFA, a training‑free aggregation technique that calibrates frozen visual foundation models for visual place recognition. TFA uses cross‑codebook agreement, retrieval coverage, and spectral statistics to adjust residual assignment, spectral shaping, and global‑feature fusion without requiring place labels or task‑specific weights. Experiments with a DINOv2‑B backbone show significant Recall@1 gains over existing training‑free methods across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that reliability‑guided aggregation can unlock additional retrieval performance from frozen representations.

By Xin Li, Zhimin Mao, Shang Wang, Siyuan Duan, Geng Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

GeoStore: Finding Small Storefronts in Large Scenes -- A Fine-Grained POI Localization Benchmark with Global-to-Local Asymmetric Matching

GeoStore is a new benchmark for fine‑grained point‑of‑interest (POI) localization that matches close‑up storefront photos against large geo‑tagged street‑view images, a task distinct from traditional visual place recognition. The paper shows that global‑descriptor methods designed for symmetric matching perform poorly on this asymmetric problem, and introduces GLAM, a Global‑to‑Local Asymmetric Matching approach that combines a global retrieval anchor with a lightweight local re‑ranking using pooled region tokens. GLAM achieves higher Recall@1/5/10 and mAP than strong baselines while using far fewer re‑ranking features and significantly lower per‑pair matching cost.

By Lu Han, Xiting Sun, Hao Wang, Zhiqiang Cao, Ruihuan Du, Ziquan Zeng, Chunlong Lv
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

Learning Query Encoders Can Be Hard Even When Vector Retrieval Is Geometrically Easy

The paper investigates the geometric capacity of vector retrieval systems, focusing on the maximum recall achievable with a fixed document index. It demonstrates that, on real-world benchmarks, single-vector query encoders often underperform relative to the index’s potential. The authors provide theoretical evidence that learning such encoders can be computationally hard, constructing a task where a simple neural network can achieve perfect recall while any statistical-query learner would need exponentially many queries to surpass random chance.

By Anders Wikum, Nina Mishra, Amin Saberi, Tal Wagner
arXiv AI
Sep 1

When Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

MINER: Multi-crop INference-time Enhancement for Rare-Object Retrieval with Frozen Dual Encoders

MINER is a training‑free inference framework that enhances frozen dual‑encoder models for text‑to‑image retrieval when queries refer to small, visually subordinate objects in cluttered scenes. It augments the global image embedding with a bank of region‑level embeddings and applies hubness‑correcting similarity rescoring, thereby recovering visual evidence that global pooling underweights. The authors introduce ROCS, a benchmark derived from Flickr30K and MS COCO, and demonstrate that MINER improves retrieval performance across CLIP, SigLIP, and SigLIP 2 backbones on both ROCS and standard splits, attributing gains mainly to broader spatial coverage rather than precise crop placement.

By Abdulmalik Alquwayfili, Faisal AlMeshal, Jumanah Almajnouni, Huda Abdulhadi Alamri, Muhammad Kamran J Khan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Efficient K-generalizable Learned Search

arXiv:2603.06159v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learned top-K search improves the accuracy-latency trade-off of graph-based vector search, but existing methods are designed for a fixed K: s...

By Yifan Peng, Jiafei Fan, Xingda Wei, Sijie Shen, Rong Chen, Jianning Wang, Xiaojian Luo, Wenyuan Yu, Jingren Zhou, Haibo Chen