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.
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:2607. 00374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a textual modification.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Just Pass Twice (JPT) is a method that allows causal large language models to perform token classification for zero‑shot named entity recognition by concatenating the input with itself, giving each token full bidirectional context without architectural changes. The approach combines these representations with definition‑guided entity embeddings to enable flexible zero‑shot generalization. JPT achieves state‑of‑the‑art results, outperforming prior methods by an average of +7.9 F1 on CrossNER and MIT benchmarks and running over 20× faster than comparable generative approaches.
arXiv:2509.22650v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most existing approaches to referring segmentation achieve strong performance only through fine-tuning or by composing multiple pre-trained models,...
arXiv:2508. 00955v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into universal embedding models typically demands resource-intensive contrastive pre-training, while traditional hard negative mining methods suffer from severe false negative contamination.
MLLMCLIP introduces a heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers multimodal knowledge from a generative Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) teacher directly into a discriminative CLIP student, eliminating the need for synthetic hard negatives. The method uses an attention-based per-layer token selection and a CKA-based distillation loss to bridge architectural differences between the two models. As a result, MLLMCLIP achieves state‑of‑the‑art compositional accuracy and improves zero‑shot classification and image‑text retrieval performance.
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.
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.