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.
By Anubhav Gupta, Hrushikesh Mohapatra, Prijith Chandra, Asish Mohapatra, Anuj Garg, Arvind Maan, Sudip Datta, Venkat Bulusu, Sitesh Kumar Jalan
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...
The paper introduces VHOP, a data generation framework and benchmark for visual agentic search, and VHOP-Router, an end‑to‑end training pipeline that turns a standard embedding model into an autoregressive multi‑step retriever operating directly in visual latent space. VHOP-Router eliminates the need for intermediate text queries, boosting retrieval accuracy from under 5% to 76.3% and improving task success rates by 52.7% while dramatically reducing token usage and API payloads. The approach generalizes to unseen difficulty levels and realistic test sets, offering an efficient solution that preserves native LLM capabilities.
By Tianyu Chen, Mingyuan Zhou, Jiaxing Wu
The paper introduces Iris-mini and Iris-pro, two search agents trained at 35B and 397B parameter scales. They use a novel data pipeline that constructs reverse‑engineered multi‑hop queries from web hyperlinks, filters trajectories, and alternates supervised fine‑tuning with reinforcement learning in a process called SFT‑RL climbing. Evaluations on several benchmarks show that, with inference‑time context management, the agents achieve the best open‑source results in their parameter ranges.
By Ziyuan Liu, Hengqi Liu, Zichuan Wang, Yang Qin, Jiachen Liang, Xu Chu, Shaowei Chen, Yuantao Gu, Mu Chuan
The paper reports a case study of a large language model (LLM) coding agent tasked with building a multi‑component data system from a detailed specification. During a single session the agent introduced five defects, which were categorized by violated constraints and detection methods. The study also evaluates the agent’s retrieval‑filtering strategy on the HotpotQA benchmark, showing that filtering to a graph‑identified entity set yields higher recall than unfiltered search, with a statistically significant gap across all tested budgets.
By Phanindra Reddy Madduru
The paper demonstrates that a frozen vision‑language model (VLM) can serve as a zero‑shot judge to rerank candidate lists for cloth‑changing person re‑identification (CC‑ReID). Using the VLM to rerank two expert models on the CHIRLA benchmark improves rank‑1 performance by an average of 12.9 points over the best expert and 9.4 over a naive ensemble, without any fine‑tuning on target data. By gating the VLM’s use to cases where the experts disagree at rank‑1, the authors reduce compute by 40% with minimal impact on rank‑1 accuracy.