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. 07032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image based on a query composed of a reference image and a relative caption without training samples.
By Zhenyu Yang, Zemin Du, Shengsheng Qian, Changsheng Xu
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: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
arXiv:2606. 28344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with retrieved web text has become a dominant paradigm, yet the web is not natively textual: existing systems depend on complex parsing pipelines that linearize HTML and discard layout, visual structure, and formatting.
By Yichuan Wang, Zhifei Li, Zirui Wang, Paul Teiletche, Lesheng Jin, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Sewon Min
arXiv:2606. 20280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR).
By Yuhan Liu, Pei Fu, Hang Li, Yukun Qi, Chao Jiang, Jingwen Fu, Zhen Liu, Bin Qin, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Jingmin Xin
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
Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image by editing a reference image with a natural-language instruction, without relying on domain-specific annotated triplets. Most existing ZS-CIR methods rely on textual inversion to translate the reference image into pseudo-text tokens and then compose them with the instruction via simple concatenation in the text space, which can be lossy and brittle for fine-grained semantics.
arXiv:2607. 25266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled long-form video understanding at a scale that was not previously possible.
By Ghazal Kaviani, Ghassan AlRegib
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.
By Kaipeng Li, Haitao Yu, Xuanchen Zhou
arXiv:2607. 18958v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), represented by LLaVA and GPT-4V, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, their visual inputs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing significant security risks.
By Sibo Wang, Jie Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen, Wen Gao
arXiv:2504. 20734v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries.
By Woongyeong Yeo, Kangsan Kim, Soyeong Jeong, Jinheon Baek, Sung Ju Hwang