M UL V EC is proposed, a role-aware method whose compiler produces a structured query record that is mapped to four retrieval roles: Global describes the full target, Desired states what should appear, Preserve states what should remain, and Forbidden states what should disappear.
Abstract
Training-free zero-shot composed image retrieval finds a target image in a gallery from a reference image and a text edit without learning from task-specific image triplets. Existing methods typically describe the target as a whole and match this description with a global image representation. This global matching can mix different semantic cues and lose fine- grained details. We propose MULVEC, a role-aware method whose compiler produces a structured query record that is mapped to four retrieval roles: Global describes the full target, Desired states what should appear, Preserve states what should remain, and Forbidden states what should disappear. Frozen encoders map the query to one target description vector and role-specific probe vectors, while each candidate is represented by one global visual vector and a bank of local visual vectors. The retrieval roles then use this shared evidence for their respective purposes, and a fixed weighted sum of their scores ranks the entire gallery in a single retrieval pass. Across CIRCO, CIRR, and FashionIQ and three backbone scales, MULVEC improves CIRCO mAP@5 by up to 23.0% over the strongest compared method and gives the best CIRR and FashionIQ results in our comparison.
Training-free zero-shot composed image retrieval finds a target image in a gallery from a reference image and a text edit without learning from task-specific image triplets. Existing methods typically describe the target as a whole and match this description with a global image representation. This global matching can mix different semantic cues and lose fine- grained details. We propose MULVEC, a role-aware method whose compiler produces a structured query record that is mapped to four retrieval roles: Global describes the full target, Desired states what should appear, Preserve states what should remain, and Forbidden states what should disappear. Frozen encoders map the query to one target description vector and role-specific probe vectors, while each candidate is represented by one global visual vector and a bank of local visual vectors. The retrieval roles then use this shared evidence for their respective purposes, and a fixed weighted sum of their scores ranks the entire gallery in a single retrieval pass. Across CIRCO, CIRR, and FashionIQ and three backbone scales, MULVEC improves CIRCO mAP@5 by up to 23.0% over the strongest compared method and gives the best CIRR and FashionIQ results in our comparison.
Zihao Zhang, Dayan Wu, Xin-Ze Liu et al.· 0 citations
Composed video retrieval (CoVR) searches a gallery for the target video that realizes a natural-language modification of a source clip. However, at gallery scale, this creates a fundamental tension: compact embeddings enable efficient, reusable search but can miss the transient actions, state changes, and subtle constraints that demand fine-grained video reasoning, whereas applying large multimodal models uniformly sacrifices scalability. To address these limitations, we propose that frozen foundation models should instead occupy complementary roles, with inference depth adapted to query difficulty. Based on this premise, we introduce \methodname{}, a framework for training-free \methodexpansion{}. Specifically, a composed-query embedding first searches reusable video-only gallery representations; uncertain queries undergo bounded reranking and candidate expansion; ambiguous edits trigger target-description generation; and only close leading candidates reach multimodal verification. To support these roles, frame selection, spatial resolution, and time cues are adapted to each stage. Across complete target-gallery evaluations, our method reaches state-of-the-art performance among training-free approaches, with 89.55 and 93.43 R@1 on Dense-WebVid-CoVR and CoVR-R, respectively (with more than +35\% and +25\% absolute margins to the closest counterpart). These results show that adaptively orchestrating foundation-model capabilities can combine scalable retrieval with fine-grained reasoning without task-specific training. The source code and all relevant guidelines are available on https://github.com/demidovd98/CoVRAGE.
Dmitry Demidov, Muhammad Zaigham Zaheer, Omkar Thawakar et al.· 0 citations
Scene Text Retrieval (STR) aims to search images containing a given textual query within large-scale image collections. However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained in two ways: 1) they are evaluated on narrow benchmarks that focus primarily on natural scenes; and 2) they rely on either error-prone multi-stage recognition-then-matching pipelines or localization-assisted matching strategies. To address these limitations, we introduce MuST, the first comprehensive benchmark for multi-scene and bilingual STR tasks, covering a broad range of real-world scenarios with carefully curated Chinese and English textual queries. On top of this benchmark, we propose BPE-Ret, a novel Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE)-level retrieval framework built on a simple yet powerful principle: a word is considered present in an image if and only if all of its constituent subwords are present. Concretely, BPE-Ret decomposes textual queries into BPE subwords and directly aligns them with dense visual features within a unified embedding space, thereby eliminating the need for explicit text spotting and coarse-grained word-level matching. We further enhance fine-grained alignment through two key innovations: a weighted preference learning scheme that prioritizes challenging cases to sharpen discrimination on confusable word-image pairs, and a subword inclusive-OR matching strategy that enforces constituent subword verification to enable robust retrieval beyond word-level granularity. Extensive experiments show that BPE-Ret establishes new state-of-the-art performance on both existing public STR benchmarks and our newly proposed MuST dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of subword-level retrieval for real-world, multilingual scene text understanding.
Tong-Kun Guan, Yu-Tong Cai, Haocheng Wang et al.· IEEE Transactions on Image P...· 0 citations
Dense document images often contain many fine-grained visual and textual entities whose relevance depends on a user query. Standard vision-language retrievers encode cropped regions with a single vector, which can mix distinct entity signals and obscure the evidence needed for fine-grained retrieval. We call this failure mode Semantic Dilution and quantitatively show that it degrades entity-level retrieval as a function of entity density. To mitigate it, we propose SAGE, a training-free framework that parses semantic entities from dense document images, represents them as hierarchical graph nodes with multi-vector embeddings, and retrieves query-relevant evidence through iterative entity-level subgraph matching. We also introduce DEAR, a dataset of 1,055 query--image pairs sourced from product detail pages, where each query requires retrieving and comparing multiple fine-grained entities from visually dense inputs across four question types of increasing complexity. Experiments show that SAGE substantially reduces semantic dilution and outperforms patch-level and OCR-based retrieval baselines on DEAR, achieving a Recall@3 of 0.849 and a generation score of 2.746 on multi-entity visual comparison queries. Our code is available at https://github.com/All4Nothing/SAGE.
Yongjoo Kim, Mincheol Kwon, Seong-Gi Choi et al.· 0 citations
This paper introduces AutoConcept, a training-free reranker that converts concept evidence into an interpretable memory that positions AutoConcept as an interpretable concept-memory reranker for product-style CIR galleries with available metadata.
Recent work reports that vision--language models (VLMs) struggle to establish and maintain stable reference in repeated reference games. Rather than ask which VLM does best, we ask a more basic question: do you need a large pretrained VLM for this at all? On grounding a single director utterance to one of twelve tangram silhouettes, we compare six off-the-shelf VLMs against a transparent baseline that uses \emph{no learned visual representation}: classical SIFT keypoint matching and a signal-quality index over retrieved images. On identical trials, the transparent baseline matches the strongest VLM (SigLIP-large) and significantly outperforms the other five, including every CLIP and OpenCLIP variant. The baseline additionally retrieves external images, so this is not a matched-information comparison; what it shows is that a learned \emph{visual} representation is not the bottleneck for this task: given retrieved images, a shape-appropriate classical similarity suffices. Along the way we find that abstract-grounding ability varies widely across VLMs (15--39\% top-1; chance 8.33\%, humans $\approx$77--80\%), so the weakness is model-specific rather than intrinsic to contrastive pretraining; on the 1{,}013-shape KiloGram benchmark the pattern generalizes for CLIP, with per-shape difficulty tracking human shape-nameability. The pipeline is a classical, inspectable alternative rather than a learned one. We close by sketching how an explicit, inspectable representation of listener-side pact state could carry this approach into interactive multi-turn reference, which we leave to future work. Code available in supplementary material.
Joe M. Bingham· 0 citations
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