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: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:2603. 09493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The adaptation of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks with limited labeled data remains a significant challenge.
By Enming Zhang, Jiayang Li, Yanlong Wang, Yanru Wu, Zhenyu Liu, Yang Li
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has been shown to have limitations in its fine-grained dense feature representation, due to its pre-training focusing on matching the whole image to a text description. Considering the large data and computational burden in pre-training a vision-language model from scratch, a series of works aim to enhance the fine-grained ability of CLIP through a fine-tuning scheme.
arXiv:2607. 22919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal embedding spaces in models like CLIP enable powerful capabilities such as semantic similarity retrieval and cross-modal zero-shot classification.
By Joseph Fioresi, Fabian Caba Heilbron, Pankaj Nathani, Mubarak Shah, Kushal Kafle
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
arXiv:2602. 21397v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt learning has become a dominant paradigm for adapting vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP to downstream tasks without modifying pretrained weights.
By Sajjad Ghiasvand, Haniyeh Ehsani Oskouie, Mahnoosh Alizadeh, Ramtin Pedarsani
arXiv:2606. 11640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot tabular learning provides a cost-effective approach for real-world applications where annotation is costly and collecting sufficient samples for new tasks is difficult.
By Ruxue Shi, Yili Wang, Mengnan Du, Hangting Ye, Yi Chang, Xin Wang
arXiv:2607. 26107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense vision-language understanding, including object localization, region recognition, and open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, requires associating language concepts with spatially grounded visual regions.
By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yutong Chen, Ge Wang, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong
arXiv:2606. 01710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, achieve powerful zero-shot classification.
By Afsaneh Hasanebrahimi, Hanxun Huang, Christopher Leckie, Sarah Erfani
Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to transfer knowledge learned from source domain to distinct target domains, segmenting unseen target classes with only a few annotated samples. Although existing methods have made significant progress, they still rely on training or fine-tuning processes, which incur high computational costs and risk overfitting.
Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) benchmarks evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as multimodal knowledge assistants by requiring external information beyond a provided image to answer questions. KI-VQA involves multiple sub-problems -referring expression understanding, visual grounding, object recognition, knowledge retrieval, and reasoning-yet existing benchmarks typically report only end-task accuracy, obscuring where failures arise.