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arXiv:2607. 23052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dual-encoder vision-language models (VLMs) expose a similarity interface that enables zero-shot retrieval but fails compositional constraints: queries like "umbrella and no person" retrieve images containing both, even when concept detection is reliable.
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.
Visual search on large e-commerce catalogs must serve both "similarity" queries that ask for items resembling an uploaded image and "modifier" queries that comprise an image and text describing a desi...
CORE improves compositional reasoning in multimodal language models by distilling a cross‑attentive reranker’s fine‑grained judgments into the embedding model. It generates candidate lists across five compositional matching levels and trains with a Rank‑KL objective to replicate the reranker’s ranking. Experiments on COLA, SUGARCREPE++, and NEGBENCH show CORE‑RERANKER‑8B outperforms Jina‑Reranker by 10.7 points, while CORE‑EMBED‑8B achieves the best overall average among evaluated embeddings, with gains also transferring to the MCMR benchmark without harming COCO or Flickr30K retrieval.
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.
The paper introduces CERES, a closed‑loop multimodal indexing framework that addresses semantic collapse in multimodal generation by building a three‑level semantic pyramid and using scale‑routed cross‑attention to generate images that remain retrievable by their original queries. CERES employs a co‑occurrence‑aware router, a lightweight U‑Net generator, and a soft‑Jaccard coverage objective to ensure generated images cover the intended concepts, verified by re‑indexing with a frozen vision‑language model and an external DINOv2 probe. Experiments on four pansharpening benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, especially under extreme scale variation, and significant improvements in concept‑query retrieval and image‑text ranking metrics.