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.
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.
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.
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:2506. 03096v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Contrastive language-image pre-training aligns features of text-image pairs in a common latent space via distinct encoders for each modality.
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.
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.
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:2609.37225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for universal multimodal representation learning. However, existing methods eith...
arXiv:2607. 00374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a textual modification.
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.