Instance-level image retrieval aims to find images containing the same object as a given query, despite variations in size, position, or appearance. To address this challenging task, we propose Patchify, a simple yet effective patch-wise retrieval framework that offers high performance, scalability, and interpretability without requiring fine-tuning. Patchify divides each database image into a small number of structured patches and performs retrieval by comparing these local features with a global query descriptor, enabling accurate and spatially grounded matching. To assess not just retrieval accuracy but also spatial correctness, we introduce LocScore, a localization-aware metric that quantifies whether the retrieved region aligns with the target object. This makes LocScore a valuable diagnostic tool for understanding and improving retrieval behavior. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, backbones, and region selection strategies, showing that Patchify outperforms global methods and complements state-of-the-art reranking pipelines. Furthermore, we apply Product Quantization for efficient large-scale retrieval and highlight the importance of using informative features during compression, which significantly boosts performance.

Automated model discovery is the process of automatically searching and identifying the most appropriate model for a given dataset over a large combinatorial search space. Existing approaches, however, often face challenges in balancing the capture of fine-grained details with ensuring generalizability beyond training data regimes with a reasonable model complexity. In this paper, we present a multi-modal \& multi-step pipeline for effective automated model discovery. Our approach leverages two vision-language-based modules (VLM), AnalyzerVLM and EvaluatorVLM, for effective model proposal and evaluation in an agentic way. AnalyzerVLM autonomously plans and executes multi-step analyses to propose effective candidate models. EvaluatorVLM assesses the candidate models both quantitatively and perceptually, regarding the fitness for local details and the generalibility for overall trends. Our results demonstrate that our pipeline effectively discovers models that capture fine details and ensure strong generalizability. Additionally, extensive ablation studies show that both multi-modality and multi-step reasoning play crucial roles in discovering favorable models.

We propose TextManiA, a text-driven manifold augmentation method that semantically enriches visual feature spaces, regardless of class distribution. TextManiA augments visual data with intra-class semantic perturbation by exploiting easy-to-understand visually mimetic words, i.e., attributes. This work is built on an interesting hypothesis that general language models, e.g., BERT and GPT, encompass visual information to some extent, even without training on visual training data. Given the hypothesis, TextManiA transfers pre-trained text representation obtained from a well-established large language encoder to a target visual feature space being learned. Our extensive analysis hints that the language encoder indeed encompasses visual information at least useful to augment visual representation. Our experiments demonstrate that TextManiA is particularly powerful in scarce samples with class imbalance as well as even distribution. We also show compatibility with the label mix-based approaches in evenly distributed scarce data.