The paper introduces Temporally Decomposable Image Representations (TDIR), a learning algorithm that separates historical photographs into distinct date and content components using orthogonal subspaces. It establishes theoretical conditions for this decomposition, quantifies errors when conditions are partially met, and demonstrates that temporal and categorical subspaces naturally become orthogonal during joint optimization. TDIR supports transitive operations, allowing temporal information from one image to be transferred to another without label supervision, and is validated on composed image retrieval tasks that require both object content and time period specification.
By Adri\`a Molina Rodr\'iguez, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Josep Llad\'os Canet
The paper introduces Image Bundle Composition (IBC), a new paradigm that moves beyond point-wise image matching to dynamically assemble cohesive image bundles from large, unstructured photo collections. It presents IBCBench, a benchmark with over 109,000 images and 667 verified queries, and proposes BundleWeaver, an agentic framework that uses a Large Language Model for relational role discovery and a Vision‑Language Model for bundle verification. Experiments show that BundleWeaver outperforms existing embedding and decompose‑and‑rerank methods, underscoring the importance of relational composition over atomic scoring.
By Rong Shan, Tianyi Xu, Congmin Zheng, Wenteng Chen, Jiachen Zhu, Junjie Wu, Teng Wang, Weiwen Liu, Changwang Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Jun Wang, Jianghao Lin
arXiv:2609.23881v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are a promising paradigm for learning task-agnostic latent world models without visual reconstruction....
By Markus Karmann, Shile Li, Christian Intern\`o, Bruno Andreis, David Klindt, Randall Balestriero, Jindong Gu, Philip Torr, Qi Zhang, Peng-Tao Jiang, Hao Zhang, Bo Li, Onay Urfalioglu
arXiv:2605. 23045v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Video representation learning has seen tremendous progress in recent years.
By Mantas Skackauskas, Xinyue Hao, Laura Sevilla-Lara
arXiv:2609.10008v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Composed video retrieval (CoVR) searches a gallery for the target video that realizes a natural-language modification of a source clip. However, at gal...
By Dmitry Demidov, Muhammad Zaigham Zaheer, Omkar Thawakar, Abdelrahman Mohamed Shaker, Rao Anwer
The paper introduces SRAIN, a framework that learns sample‑wise, rank‑aware interpolation weights for composed visual data retrieval. Instead of relying on complex multimodal large language models, SRAIN uses simple linear interpolation in embedding space, dynamically predicting query‑specific weights through batch‑wise rank‑aware estimation and a compact memory bank for hard negatives. This approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on composed video retrieval and competitive results on composed image retrieval while significantly reducing query‑time latency.
By Boseung Jeong, Taegyu Park, Donghyeon Kwon, Hyunsouk Cho, Suha Kwak
The paper introduces AllocEmbed, an allocate‑then‑embed framework that reallocates a fixed visual‑input budget across more video frames to improve retrieval performance. A lightweight allocator uses low‑cost previews to assign frame‑wise resolutions before the embedding backbone, preserving detail where it most benefits retrieval while reducing visual cost elsewhere. Retrieval‑Driven Policy Optimization (RDPO) learns the allocator directly from retrieval feedback, and the method integrates with existing systems without modifying the embedding model.
By Song Jin, Zhongtao Jiang, Chenglei Shen, Huanxuan Liao, Haozhe Chi, Zhiwei Wang, Kun Xu, Yong Liu
LinSlot proposes a joint framework for discovering object and attribute representations from raw images by leveraging the Linear Representation Hypothesis (LRH), which posits that composable concepts can be represented as linearly additive subspaces in slot representations. The method introduces a probabilistic model linking images, slots (objects), and blocks (attributes) and employs block attention to connect attribute representations to slots while incorporating LRH in both representation spaces. Experiments on multiple datasets show that LinSlot achieves effective disentanglement, provides empirical support for LRH in slot space, and enables image editing, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods in DCI scores.
By Sanket Gandhi, Utkarsh Giri, Varun Subramanium, Rohan Paul, Parag Singla
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.
By Joseph Fioresi, Fabian Caba Heilbron, Pankaj Nathani, Mubarak Shah, Kushal Kafle
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
The paper introduces VANE, a self‑supervised visual pretraining framework that learns from next‑frame prediction in embedding space. It uses a causal encoder to summarize past observations, a state predictor to infer the representation of the entire next frame, and a lightweight generative decoder to reconstruct fine‑grained spatial detail. By applying the same objective to both videos and still images through a local‑to‑global crop sequence, VANE achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on anticipation, recognition, and dense perception benchmarks, notably outperforming V‑JEPA on EPIC‑KITCHENS‑100 action anticipation.
By Yifeng Yao, Jinghan Li, Zhihao Zhang, Yajiao Xiong, Yang Jin, Kun Xu, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao
arXiv:2610.30724v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Video provides a natural source of supervision: what happens next serves as a learning signal for visual world modeling. Yet masked video pre...
By Yifeng Yao, Jinghan Li, Zhihao Zhang, Yajiao Xiong, Yang Jin, Kun Xu, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao