The paper introduces Preserve-and-Compose Training (PACT) for composed image retrieval, a task where a query image is modified by a textual instruction while preserving visual content from a reference image. PACT learns from image–text–text triplets, using target captions for supervision and visual evidence from the source image to maintain relevant details, without requiring target images or gallery updates. The authors also propose Chord scoring, which blends target similarity with source-relative directional agreement in a frozen image space, and demonstrate that this combined approach yields strong retrieval performance across multiple zero-shot CIR benchmarks and various backbones.
By Sehyun Kwon
Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image from a multimodal query consisting of a reference image and an edit text describing the desired modification. Recent ZS-CIR studies have relied on projection-based methods that map a reference image into pseudo-word tokens in the text embedding space.
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
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: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
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.
Re$^3$Cap introduces a retrieval‑guided refinement strategy for image captioning that leverages multi‑modal retrieval as a reasoning signal. The method, built on a Caption Refinement Suggester and a Caption Quality Assessor, detects hallucinations and omissions to produce more accurate and detailed captions without extra annotations. Experiments show it surpasses supervised fine‑tuning and improves relation reasoning by 8.64% on the COCO‑LN500 benchmark.
By Haonan Jia, Shichao Dong, Zenghui Sun, Jiawen Zheng, Ziqi Miao, Gege Shi, Qiuyu Zhao, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
The paper examines the intermediate‑entropy regime of natural language generation, where a single input can have multiple valid outputs such as in peer‑review generation and image captioning. It introduces a target‑side consolidation method that merges all references into a single target preserving every distinct information unit, and presents the MERC‑67K dataset of 36,537 papers and 31,014 images with both original and consolidated references. Human evaluations show that models trained on consolidated references achieve higher coverage and overall quality scores, outperforming multi‑reference baselines across several large language models while using fewer individual references during training.
By Maitreya Prafulla Chitale, Ketaki Mangesh Shetye, Yash More, Harshit Gupta, Manav Chaudhary, Manish Shrivastava, Vasudeva Varma
Flow-CLIP introduces a method to improve compositional image-text matching by refining global image-text alignment with image-conditioned changes in token–patch evidence. It combines Global Compatibility Calibration (GCC) for sentence-level similarity, Image-Conditioned Evidence Refinement (ICER) to incorporate visual patch context, and Cross-Image Margin Ranking (CIMR) to enhance ranking margins when images support correct descriptions. Experiments demonstrate that Flow-CLIP outperforms pretrained CLIP and other global alignment approaches on binding accuracy and reduces reliance on language priors.
By Minghong Wei, Enguang Zhu, Pu Cao, Lu Yang, Qing Song
arXiv:2606. 07451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models such as CLIP are highly useful for diverse tasks due to their shared image-text embedding space.
By Sweta Mahajan, Sukrut Rao, Jiahao Xie, Alexander Koller, Bernt Schiele
DEPICT is a new training‑free metric for evaluating text‑to‑image alignment. It replaces fixed reference answers with an agreement rule that compares image‑based and caption‑only responses, weighting questions by how decisively the caption determines them. By merging this agreement score with a holistic score, DEPICT improves negation accuracy dramatically and outperforms existing training‑free metrics while matching or exceeding fine‑tuned evaluators on several benchmarks.
By Vasco Ramos, Sandra Godinho Silva, Joao Magalhaes, Ricardo Rei, Pedro Henrique Martins
arXiv:2606.29997v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Automatic evaluation of image and video captioning is essential for benchmarking multimodal systems, although standard evaluation metrics show limi...
By Shuitsu Koyama, Kazuki Matsuda, Yuiga Wada, Shinnosuke Hirano, Daichi Yashima, Komei Sugiura