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.
Due to their strong generalizable multimodal processing and reasoning capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential as universal image retrievers, effectively addressing diverse real-world image retrieval tasks. Nevertheless, pioneering studies, while promising, overlook the potential of fine-grained context modeling and disentangled fine-tuning objectives in enhancing MLLMs' retrieval performance, particularly for complex tasks such as long-text-to-image retrieval, visual dialog retrieval, and composed image retrieval (CIR).
arXiv:2606. 15134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched.
By Shubhang Bhatnagar, Dheeraj Baiju, Narendra Ahuja
arXiv:2610.09502v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) recognizes categories unseen during training through textual category queries, yet achieving strong generalization with...
By Yupeng Zhang, Ziyi Zhao, Juntao Cheng, Sheng Wang, Ningnan Guo, Ruize Han, Liang Wan
Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) recognizes categories unseen during training through textual category queries, yet achieving strong generalization with real-time efficiency remains challenging. Beyond...
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
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: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.
By Xinyu Mao, Junsi Li, Haoji Zhang, Yu Liang, Ming Sun
FLAT (Flexible‑Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a joint multimodal pre‑training framework that learns a shared encoder for images and text, producing 1‑D continuous embeddings that can be directly used by downstream generative decoders. By combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross‑modal generative objectives, FLAT yields representations that are both discriminative and generative, enabling cross‑modal retrieval and generation with a single pre‑training stage. The model achieves strong performance on T2I generation (GenEval 71.1), image captioning (BLEU‑4 40.5, CIDEr 138.6), and retrieval tasks (Recall@5 86.8/75.8 on MS‑COCO, 98.3/93.6 on Flickr30K), and supports linear interpolation, latent space arithmetic, and zero‑shot composed retrieval.
By Guangyu Sun, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Wentao Bao, Robert Zhenheng Yang, Xiao Wang, Xiyuan Wang, Yujunrong Ma, Chen Yuan, Max Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao, Jianpeng Cheng
Traditional multimodal representation learning and generation are two stages: a contrastive or self-supervised visual encoder is trained first, followed by a separate downstream generative model. This...
MLLMCLIP introduces a heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers multimodal knowledge from a generative Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) teacher directly into a discriminative CLIP student, eliminating the need for synthetic hard negatives. The method uses an attention-based per-layer token selection and a CKA-based distillation loss to bridge architectural differences between the two models. As a result, MLLMCLIP achieves state‑of‑the‑art compositional accuracy and improves zero‑shot classification and image‑text retrieval performance.
By Jongsuk Kim, Qiyu Wu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Hiromi Wakaki, Junmo Kim, Yuki Mitsufuji
ShotFinder introduces a new benchmark for open‑domain video shot retrieval, formalizing editing requirements as keyframe‑oriented shot descriptions and adding five controllable constraints—temporal order, color, visual style, audio, and resolution. The benchmark comprises 1,210 high‑quality YouTube samples across 20 themes, generated with large models and verified by humans. A three‑stage retrieval pipeline—query expansion via video imagination, candidate video retrieval, and description‑guided shot localization—shows a notable performance gap to humans, especially for color and visual style constraints.
By Tao Yu, Haopeng Jin, Hao Wang, Shenghua Chai, Yujia Yang, Junhao Gong, Jiaming Guo, Minghui Zhang, Xinlong Chen, Zhenghao Zhang, Yuxuan Zhou, Yufei Xiong, Shanbin Zhang, Jiabing Yang, YiFan Zhang, Hongzhu Yi, Xinming Wang, Cheng Zhong, Xiao Ma, Zhang Zhang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang