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).
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.
arXiv:2608.23102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging paradigm in content-based image retrieval that enables users to formulate compositional queries by combin...
arXiv:2609.05518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the strong capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their parametric knowledge remains incomplete and difficult to update, m...
The paper introduces ReT-2, a unified retrieval model that handles multimodal queries containing both images and text and searches across multimodal document collections. It employs a recurrent Transformer architecture with LSTM-inspired gating to integrate information across layers and modalities, capturing fine-grained visual and textual details. Evaluations on M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, faster inference, and lower memory usage, and the model also boosts downstream tasks in retrieval‑augmented generation pipelines.
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:2608. 12987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative information retrieval (GIR) has emerged as a compelling alternative to the conventional index-retrieve-then-rank retrieval pipeline by training a generator to produce the identifiers of relevant items directly.
The paper introduces TIC‑Bench, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models on deeply interleaved text‑image contexts. It covers logical, temporal, and spatial association tasks, totaling 2,280 questions across eight specific types. The authors benchmarked ten state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs, finding a significant performance gap versus human experts and highlighting persistent challenges in integrating evidence across interleaved visual and textual inputs.
The paper introduces MK‑FSS, a few‑shot segmentation framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to extract spatial and semantic target knowledge from query images. Spatial knowledge is encoded into a memory representation and fused with support‑guided memory via a dual‑memory debate‑fusion module, while semantic knowledge is turned into a textual feature and combined with multi‑scale query features through a progressive cross‑modal prompt generator. Together, these components produce a robust target representation that improves segmentation performance over existing methods.
arXiv:2607. 22643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (mRAG) aims to answer image-text queries with external knowledge, but most existing systems still retrieve directly from raw multimodal input over a flat evidence space.
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.
arXiv:2609.12965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-based person search (TBPS) aims to retrieve images of a target person from a large image gallery based on a given natural language description. Mo...
arXiv:2604.17422v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long video understanding remains a formidable challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to the prohibitive cost of processing dens...