Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables image retrieval by combining multiple query modalities, but existing benchmarks predominantly focus on general-domain imagery and rely on reference images with short textual modifications. As a result, they provide limited support for retrieval scenarios that require fine-grained semantic reasoning, structured visual understanding, and domain-specific knowledge. In this work, we introduce CIRThan, a sketch+text composed image retrieval dataset for Thangka imagery, a culturally grounded and knowledge-specific visual domain characterized by complex structures, dense symbolic elements, and domain-dependent semantic conventions. CIRThan contains 2,287 high-quality Thangka images, each paired with a human-drawn sketch and hierarchical textual descriptions at three semantic levels, enabling composed queries that jointly express structural intent and multi-level semantic specification. We provide standardized data splits, comprehensive dataset analysis, and benchmark evaluations of representative supervised and zero-shot CIR methods. Experimental results reveal that existing CIR approaches, largely developed for general-domain imagery, struggle to effectively align sketch-based abstractions and hierarchical textual semantics with fine-grained Thangka images, particularly without in-domain supervision. We believe CIRThan offers a valuable benchmark for advancing sketch+text CIR, hierarchical semantic modeling, and multimodal retrieval in cultural heritage and other knowledge-specific visual domains. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/jinyuxu-whut/CIRThan.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve a target image from a query composed of a reference image and modification text. Recent training-free zero-shot methods often employ Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to compose a target image description for retrieval. However, due to the fuzzy matching nature of ZS-CIR, the generated description is prone to semantic bias relative to the target image. We propose SDR-CIR, a training-free Semantic Debias Ranking method based on CoT reasoning. First, Selective CoT guides the MLLM to extract visual content relevant to the modification text during image understanding, thereby reducing visual noise at the source. We then introduce a Semantic Debias Ranking with two steps, Anchor and Debias, to mitigate semantic bias. In the Anchor step, we fuse reference image features with target description features to reinforce useful semantics and supplement omitted cues. In the Debias step, we explicitly model the visual semantic contribution of the reference image to the description and incorporate it into the similarity score as a penalty term. By supplementing omitted cues while suppressing redundancy, SDR-CIR mitigates semantic bias and improves retrieval performance. Experiments on three standard CIR benchmarks show that SDR-CIR achieves state-of-the-art results among one-stage methods while maintaining high efficiency. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/suny105/SDR-CIR.

Thangka art, part of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is visually characterized by complex junctions and intricate corners, demand high-fidelity vectorization to preserve its structural integrity and smooth curvilinear aesthetics. Conventional line art vectorization algorithms applied to Thangka element line art face challenges: (1) hard to fit complex junctions that leads to spurious spikes and discontinuous strokes; and (2) unnatural distortions in long curves due to insufficient smoothness constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a skeleton-guided vectorization framework to optimize the topology of vectorized Thangka element line art, and a multilayer perceptual loss as a smoothness regulation to improve curve continuity. Experimental results on manually annotated Thangka element line art dataset demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in preserving topological integrity and achieving visual smoothness, offering a robust foundation for digitizing cultural heritage artworks with complex topologies and similar aesthetic requirements.

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to alleviate the data sparsity by transferring knowledge across domains.Disentangled representation learning provides an effective solution to model complex user preferences by separating intra-domain features (domainshared and domain-specific features), thereby enhancing robustness and interpretability.However, disentanglement-based CDR methods employing generative modeling or GNNs with contrastive objectives face two key challenges: (i) pre-separation strategies decouple features before extracting collaborative signals, disrupting intra-domain interactions and introducing noise; (ii) unsupervised disentanglement objectives lack explicit task-specific guidance, resulting in limited consistency and suboptimal alignment.To address these challenges, we propose DGCDR, a GNN-enhanced encoder-decoder framework.To handle challenge (i), DGCDR first applies GNN to extract high-order collaborative signals, providing enriched representations as a robust foundation for disentanglement.The encoder then dynamically disentangles features into domain-shared and -specific spaces, preserving collaborative information during the separation process.To handle challenge (ii), the

This is an erratum for the article "A Dual Perspective Framework of Knowledge-correlation for Cross-domain Recommendation" published in ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data 18(6): 152:1-152:28 (2024).

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to utilize the information from relevant domains to guide the recommendation task in the target domain, and shows great potential in alleviating the data sparsity and cold-start problems of recommender systems. Most existing methods utilize the interaction information (e.g., ratings and clicks) or consider auxiliary information (e.g., tags and comments) to analyze the users' cross-domain preferences, but such kinds of information ignore the intrinsic semantic relationship of different domains. In order to effectively explore the inter-domain correlations, encyclopedic knowledge graphs (KG) involving different domains are highly desired in cross-domain recommendation tasks because they contain general information covering various domains with structured data format. However, there are few datasets containing KG information for CDR tasks, so in order to enrich the available data resource, we build a KG-enhanced cross-domain recommendation dataset, named Amazon-KG, based on the widely used Amazon dataset for CDR and the well-known KG DBpedia. In this work, we analyze the potential of KG applying in cross-domain recommendations, and describe the construction process of our dataset in detail. Finally, we perform quantitative statistical analysis on the dataset. We believe that datasets like Amazon-KG contribute to the development of knowledge-aware cross-domain recommender systems. Our dataset has been released at https://github.com/WangYuhan-0520/Amazon-KG-v2.0-dataset.

Recommender System provides users with online services in a personalized way. The performance of traditional recommender systems may deteriorate because of problems such as cold-start and data sparsity. Cross-domain Recommendation System utilizes the richer information from auxiliary domains to guide the task in the target domain. However, direct knowledge transfer may lead to a negative impact due to data heterogeneity and feature mismatch between domains. In this article, we innovatively explore the cross-domain correlation from the perspectives of content semanticity and structural connectivity to fully exploit the information of Knowledge Graph. First, we adopt domain adaptation that automatically extracts transferable features to capture cross-domain semantic relations. Second, we devise a knowledge-aware graph neural network to explicitly model the high-order connectivity across domains. Third, we develop feature fusion strategies to combine the advantages of semantic and structural information. By simulating the cold-start scenario on two real-world datasets, the experimental results show that our proposed method has superior performance in accuracy and diversity compared with the SOTA methods. It demonstrates that our method can accurately predict users’ expressed preferences while exploring their potential diverse interests.

Thangka cultural elements detection aims to locate and identify instances in Thangka. However, as a unique form of pictorial art, Thangka exhibits distinct spatial structures that deviate significantly from general images in scale and density. Therefore, it is challenging for most state-of-the-art detectors designed for natural scenes to handle Thangka cultural elements detection effectively. To overcome this issue, we propose a multi-scale and dense object detector referred as MDDet. It embeds a multi-scale receptive field fusion module (MRF) that enlarges the receptive field while capturing the spatial and channel relationships at different scales, which significantly enriches the multi-scale features extracted from the backbone. In addition, we introduce a threshold-slicing aided hyper inference (T-SAHI) scheme, which adaptively slices images in dense scenarios to aid with dense object detection in the test time. We thoroughly evaluate our method, and MDDet outperforms the prior art by a clear margin on the Thangka dataset, achieving an absolute improvement of 1.9% in average precision (AP). For the challenging medium and small objects in Thangka, MDDet obtains wide margins of 12% and 3.7% in accuracy improvement, respectively. It also shows strong generalization ability when evaluated on general scenarios, e.g., Pascal VOC 2007 and MS COCO, validating the role of MDDet in object detection.

Person re-identification (re-id) has received ever-increasing research focus, because of its important role in video surveillance applications. This paper addresses the re-id problem between visible images of color cameras and infrared images of infrared cameras, which is significant in case that the appearance information is insufficient in poor illumination conditions. In this field, there are two key challenges, i.e., the difficulty to locate the discriminative information to re-identify the same person between visible and infrared images, and the difficulty to learn a robust metric for such large-scale cross-modality retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel human body parts assistance network (BANet) to tackle the two challenges above. BANet mainly focuses on extracting discriminative information and learning robust features by leveraging the human body part cues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline and the state-of-the-art methods.