PhotoBench is a new benchmark built from authentic personal photo albums that moves beyond simple visual matching to focus on personalized, intent-driven retrieval. It incorporates a multi-source profiling framework that combines visual semantics, spatial‑temporal metadata, social identity, and temporal events to generate complex queries reflecting users’ life trajectories. Evaluation on PhotoBench reveals two key limitations: a modality gap where unified embedding models fail on non‑visual constraints, and a source fusion paradox where agentic systems struggle with tool orchestration.
By Tianyi Xu, Rong Shan, Junjie Wu, Jiadeng Huang, Teng Wang, Jiachen Zhu, Wenteng Chen, Minxin Tu, Quantao Dou, Zhaoxiang Wang, Changwang Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Jun Wang, Jianghao Lin
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.
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
MulVec is a training‑free zero‑shot composed image retrieval method that matches a target image to a gallery using a reference image and a text edit. It introduces a role‑aware query system that separates the target description into four retrieval roles—Global, Desired, Preserve, and Forbidden—each mapped to specific probe vectors. By combining global and local visual representations, MulVec achieves significant performance gains on CIRCO, CIRR, and FashionIQ datasets, improving CIRCO mAP@5 by up to 23.0% over prior methods.
By Zihao Zhang, Dayan Wu, Xinze Liu, Hengjie Zhu, Yiliang Zhu, Ding Wang, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang
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
arXiv:2510. 01483v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong image-level scene understanding, but reasoning over long egocentric video remains costly: because VLMs maintain no persistent memory or explicit spatial representation, all sampled frames must be re-processed for every new query.
By Mohamad Al Mdfaa, Svetlana Lukina, Timur Akhtyamov, Arthur Nigmatzyanov, Dmitrii Nalberskii, Sergey Zagoruyko, Gonzalo Ferrer
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
arXiv:2604. 09508v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VRAG) empowers Vision-Language Models to retrieve and reason over visually rich documents.
By Yucheng Shen, Jiulong Wu, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Lingyong Yan, Min Cao
arXiv:2607. 16305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong progress in multimodal understanding.
By Zeyu Xu, Xingzhong Hou, Pengkai Guo, Siling Lin, Xiao Xu, Menghua Zhai, Haoyu Chen, Yunke Zhang, Fei Huang
Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) retrieves videos that match a natural-language query, but extending image-text models such as CLIP to videos is fundamentally limited by the lack of temporal modeling. Video...
CogCanvas is a new benchmark for multi-subject reference-based image generation, featuring 1,952 curated reference images of 100 celebrities, 115 objects/fashion items, and 29 real-world backgrounds. It generates 1,361 compositional prompts with 2–5 people, using a pipeline that includes DINOv2 deduplication, aesthetic filtering, and automated graph derivation for interaction and positioning. The benchmark evaluates three tasks—reference-based multi-human-object generation, text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval—under a six-axis protocol, and introduces BG‑Sim and Attr‑VQA metrics to assess background fidelity and attribute binding.
By Long-Bao Nguyen, Quang-Khai Le, Tam V. Nguyen, Minh-Triet Tran, Trung-Nghia Le
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