Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging yet challenging task that allows users to search for target images using a multimodal query, comprising a reference image and a modification text specifying the user’s desired changes to the reference image. Given its significant academic and practical value, CIR has become a rapidly growing area of interest in the computer vision and machine learning communities, particularly with the advances in deep learning. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no comprehensive review of CIR to provide a timely overview of this field. Therefore, we synthesize insights from over 150 publications in top conferences and journals, including ACM TOIS, SIGIR, and CVPR. In particular, we systematically categorize existing supervised CIR and zero-shot CIR models using a fine-grained taxonomy. For a comprehensive review, we also briefly discuss approaches for tasks closely related to CIR, such as attribute-based CIR and dialog-based CIR. Additionally, we summarize benchmark datasets for evaluation and analyze existing supervised and zero-shot CIR methods by comparing experimental results across multiple datasets. Furthermore, we present promising future directions in this field, offering practical insights for researchers interested in further exploration.

Multi-modal recommender systems have become indispensable in modern applications. Despite promising results, existing methods have two key limitations. First, in item characteristic modeling, they rely solely on the merchant’s description and often neglect customer reviews, leading to biased item quality assessment. Second, in user preference modeling, they focus mainly on one-hop user-item interactions in the interaction graph, overlooking multi-hop interactions, which limits the understanding of user preferences. To address these issues, we propose a Joint Content and Interaction Augmented Framework (JCIAF) for multi-modal recommendation. Specifically, we leverage large language models to extract valuable insights from user reviews, integrating this with the merchant’s description to form a more comprehensive textual representation of the item. This enriched description provides a balanced foundation for item characteristic modeling. Next, we enhance the user-item interaction graph with two additional interaction types: user-item-item (two-hop) and user-item-user-item (three-hop), which offer augmented views for more thorough user preference modeling. We apply a diffusion-based method across the three augmented graphs and introduce an online knowledge distillation mechanism to enable cross-graph learning. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code is accessible at https://github.com/jjlinnn/JClAF.git.

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).Therefore, in this work, we propose an automated fine-grained multimodal quintuple dataset construction pipeline and a novel two-stage fine-grained multimodal fine-tuning strategy.The dataset generation pipeline produces a comprehensive CIR dataset with fine-grained image captions and modification text, facilitating fine-grained context modeling.Beyond the previously entangled fine-tuning paradigm, our approach separates the fine-tuning process into two distinct stages: (1) fine-grained context reasoning-oriented fine-tuning and (2) fine-grained retrieval-oriented fine-tuning.These stages aim to sequentially enhance the model's context understanding and query-target alignment capabilities, thereby improving retrieval performance.Extensive experiments across five datasets encompassing diverse and complex image retrieval tasks demonstrate the remarkable superiority of our method over existing approaches in *Xuemeng Song (sxmustc

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) allows users to search target images with a multimodal query, comprising a reference image and a modification text that describes the user's modification demand over the reference image. Nevertheless, due to the expensive labor cost of training data annotation, recent researchers have shifted to the challenging task of zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR), which targets fulfilling CIR without annotated triplets. The pioneer ZS-CIR studies focus on converting the CIR task into a standard text-to-image retrieval task by pre-training a textual inversion network that can map a given image into a single pseudo-word token. Despite their significant progress, their coarse-grained textual inversion may be insufficient to capture the full content of the image accurately. To overcome this issue, in this work, we propose a novel Fine-grained Textual Inversion Network for ZS-CIR, named FTI4CIR. In particular, FTI4CIR comprises two main components: fine-grained pseudo-word token mapping and tri-wise caption-based semantic regularization. The former maps the image into a subject-oriented pseudo-word token and several attribute-oriented pseudo-word tokens to comprehensively express the image in the textual form, while the latter works on jointly aligning the fine-grained pseudo-word tokens to the real-word token embedding space based on a BLIP-generated image caption template. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve the target image based on a multimodal query, i.e., a reference image paired with corresponding modification text. Recent CIR studies leverage vision-language pre-trained (VLP) methods as the feature extraction backbone and perform nonlinear feature-level multimodal query fusion to retrieve the target image. Despite the promising performance, we argue that their nonlinear feature-level multimodal fusion may lead to the fused feature deviating from the original embedding space, potentially hurting the retrieval performance. To address this issue, in this work, we propose shifting the multimodal fusion from the feature level to the raw-data level to fully exploit the VLP model's multimodal encoding and cross-modal alignment abilities. In particular, we introduce a Dual Query Unification-based Composed Image Retrieval framework (DQU-CIR), whose backbone simply involves a VLP model's image encoder and a text encoder. Specifically, DQU-CIR first employs two training-free query unification components to derive a unified textual and visual query based on the raw data of the multimodal query, respectively. The unified textual query is derived by concatenating the modification text with the extracted reference image's textual description, while the unified visual query is created by writing the key modification words onto the reference image. Ultimately, to address diverse search intentions, DQU-CIR linearly combines the features of the two unified queries encoded by the VLP model to retrieve the target image. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Fashion Compatibility Modeling (FCM) is a new yet challenging task, which aims to automatically access the matching degree among a set of complementary items. Most of existing methods evaluate the fashion compatibility from the common perspective, but overlook the user's personal preference. Inspired by this, a few pioneers study the Personalized Fashion Compatibility Modeling (PFCM). Despite their significance, these PFCM methods mainly concentrate on the user and item entities, as well as their interactions, but ignore the attribute entities, which contain rich semantics. To address this problem, we propose to fully explore the related entities and their relations involved in PFCM to boost the PFCM performance. This is, however, non-trivial due to the heterogeneous contents of different entities, embeddings for new users, and various high-order relations. Towards these ends, we present a novel metapath-guided personalized fashion compatibility modeling, dubbed as MG-PFCM. In particular, we creatively build a heterogeneous graph to unify the three types of entities (i.e., users, items, and attributes) and their relations (i.e., user-item interactions, item-item matching relations, and item-attribute association relations). Thereafter, we design a multi-modal content-oriented user embedding module to learn user representations by inheriting the contents of their interacted items. Meanwhile, we define the user-oriented and item-oriented metapaths, and perform the metapath-guided heterogeneous graph learning to enhance the user and item embeddings. In addition, we introduce the contrastive regularization to improve the model performance. We conduct extensive experiments on the real-world benchmark dataset, which verifies the superiority of our proposed scheme over several cutting-edge baselines. As a byproduct, we have released our source codes to benefit other researchers.

Composing text and image for image retrieval (CTI-IR) is a new yet challenging task, for which the input query is not the conventional image or text but a composition, i.e., a reference image and its corresponding modification text. The key of CTI-IR lies in how to properly compose the multi-modal query to retrieve the target image. In a sense, pioneer studies mainly focus on composing the text with either the local visual descriptor or global feature of the reference image. However, they overlook the fact that the text modifications are indeed diverse, ranging from the concrete attribute changes, like "change it to long sleeves", to the abstract visual property adjustments, e.g., "change the style to professional". Thus, simply emphasizing the local or global feature of the reference image for the query composition is insufficient. In light of the above analysis, we propose a Comprehensive Linguistic-Visual Composition Network (CLVC-Net) for image retrieval. The core of CLVC-Net is that it designs two composition modules: fine-grained local-wise composition module and fine-grained global-wise composition module, targeting comprehensive multi-modal compositions. Additionally, a mutual enhancement module is designed to promote local-wise and global-wise composition processes by forcing them to share knowledge with each other. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our CLVC-Net. We released the codes to benefit other researchers.

In this work, we aim to investigate the practical task of flexible fashion search with attribute manipulation, where users can retrieve the target fashion items by replacing the unwanted attributes of an available query image with the desired ones (e.g., changing the collar attribute from v-neck to round). Although several pioneer efforts have been dedicated to fulfilling the task, they mainly ignore the potential of generative models in enhancing the visual understanding of target fashion items. To this end, we propose an end-to-end generative attribute manipulation scheme, which consists of a generator and a discriminator. The generator works on producing the prototype image that meets the user's requirement of attribute manipulation over the query image with the regularization of visual-semantic consistency and pixel-wise consistency. Besides, the discriminator aims to jointly fulfill the semantic learning towards correct attribute manipulation and adversarial metric learning for fashion search. Pertaining to the adversarial metric learning, we provide two general paradigms: the pair-based scheme and the triplet-based scheme, where the fake generated prototype images that closely resemble the ground truth images of target items are incorporated as hard negative samples to boost the model performance. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our scheme.