MulVec is a training‑free zero‑shot composed image retrieval method that matches a target image to a gallery using a reference image and a text edit. It introduces a role‑aware query system that separates the target description into four retrieval roles—Global, Desired, Preserve, and Forbidden—each mapped to specific probe vectors. By combining global and local visual representations, MulVec achieves significant performance gains on CIRCO, CIRR, and FashionIQ datasets, improving CIRCO mAP@5 by up to 23.0% over prior methods.
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.
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.
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 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.
The paper proposes augmenting the global [CLS] token and register tokens of vision transformers with spatial region tokens to better capture fine‑grained image details. By matching each semantic token with a corresponding image patch, the method automatically generates localized ROI tokens without external annotations. These tokens are then used in a multi‑vector retrieval framework inspired by ColBERT, improving fine‑grained image retrieval while keeping storage costs manageable.
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: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.
The paper introduces Less-is-More CIR, a two-stage, training-free framework for zero-shot composed image retrieval. First, it generates concise target-oriented captions that keep only the most discriminative modification semantics, reducing semantic noise. Second, a critic re-ranking module evaluates retrieved candidates for modification consistency and reference preservation, improving retrieval performance.
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: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 GradCIR, a method for training composed image retrieval (CIR) systems on graded relevance rather than binary relevance. It uses a vision‑language model to generate queries and 4‑level relevance labels, an iterative feedback loop to mine hard negatives, and a hierarchy‑aware angular objective to directly optimize graded labels. Experiments on a Walmart catalog and FashionIQ show significant NDCG improvements and the system is deployed in Walmart’s live visual‑search traffic.