Selective Constraint Learning for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval
Abstract
Unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval aims to retrieve semantically consistent images across domains with significant domain gaps, which poses substantial challenges under the absence of annotations in both domains. Existing approaches primarily rely on internally derived supervision signals for representation learning and cross-domain alignment. However, such internally induced supervision tends to impose an upper bound on achievable retrieval performance, as it lacks stable semantic references to support reliable category-level correspondence across domains. To address these limitations, we propose Selective Constraint Learning (SCL), a framework that introduces external semantic guidance as a stable prior for unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval. Leveraging a pre-trained foundation model, SCL constructs a dual-scope constraint bank to capture high-confidence positive and negative semantic relations within and across domains. Based on this, we design a generic constraint loss to jointly facilitate intra-domain compactness and inter-domain alignment. In addition, prototypical geometry regularization is designed to enhance in-domain structural stability through prototype-centered pull-and-push forces. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SCL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amir Ingber | 44 | 60 Compressing Tabular Data via Pairwise Dependencies (2017) Others 59 Compression Schemes for Similarity Queries (2014) Efficient Retrieval and Indexing Systems › Others 59 Compression for Quadratic Similarity Queries (2015) Efficient Retrieval and Indexing Systems › Others |
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| 2 | Yong Li 0004 | 42 | 60 Consistency maintenance in real-time collaborative image editing systems (2003) Others 60 Group undo framework and algorithms in real-time collaborative image editing systems (2003) Others 60 PEACE: Towards Efficient Project-Level Efficiency Optimization via Hybrid Code Editing (2025) Others |
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| 3 | Sajad Ebrahimi 0001 | 41 | 61 Reviewerly: Modeling the Reviewer Assignment Task as an Information Retrieval Problem (2024) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others 61 exHarmony: Authorship and Citations for Benchmarking the Reviewer Assignment Problem (2025) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others 60 RottenReviews: Benchmarking Review Quality with Human and LLM-Based Judgments (2025) Others |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Ge Li 0001 | 48 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Ge Li 0001 assigned | 48 | 4 papers | |
| Hao Fei 0001 | 39 | 4 papers | |
| Dacheng Tao COI: co-author | 39 | 5 papers | |
| Xun Yang 0001 | 37 | 4 papers | |
| Fernando Diaz 0001 | 32 | 12 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 29 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zhe Xu 0009 | 50 | 3 | 100 Bilateral Relation Distillation for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization (2023) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others 100 Robust Temporal Action Localization With Meta Boundary Refinement (2025) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others |
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| 2 | Yuanzhao Zhai | 49 | 3 | 60 Preference-Strength-Aware Self-Improving Alignment with Generative Preference Models (2025) Others 60 Correcting Large Language Model Behavior via Influence Function (2025) Others |
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| 4 | Fangzhou Yao | 45 | 3 | 64 FedJudge: Federated Legal Large Language Model (2024) LLMs for Recommendation and Personalization › Others 60 Denoising Programming Knowledge Tracing with a Code Graph-based Tuning Adaptor (2025) Others |
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| 5 | Amir Ingber assigned | 44 | 3 | 60 Compressing Tabular Data via Pairwise Dependencies (2017) Others 59 Compression Schemes for Similarity Queries (2014) Efficient Retrieval and Indexing Systems › Others |
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| 6 | Hung Vinh Tran | 42 | 3 | 100 LODENet: A Holistic Approach to Offline Handwritten Chinese and Japanese Text Line Recognition (2020) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others 27 A Thorough Performance Benchmarking on Lightweight Embedding-based Recommender Systems (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 7 | Yong Li 0004 assigned | 42 | 3 | 60 Consistency maintenance in real-time collaborative image editing systems (2003) Others 60 Group undo framework and algorithms in real-time collaborative image editing systems (2003) Others |
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| 8 | Sajad Ebrahimi 0001 assigned | 41 | 3 | 61 Reviewerly: Modeling the Reviewer Assignment Task as an Information Retrieval Problem (2024) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others 61 exHarmony: Authorship and Citations for Benchmarking the Reviewer Assignment Problem (2025) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others |
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| 9 | Jingwei Cheng | 41 | 3 | 61 DEBAR: Mitigating Contextual Bias in Cross-Document Relation Extraction via Dual-Stream Decoupling (2026) Knowledge Graphs and Entity-Centric Retrieval › Others 61 Frame First, Then Extract: A Frame-Semantic Reasoning Pipeline for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction (2025) Knowledge Graphs and Entity-Centric Retrieval › Others |
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| 10 | Maryam Amirizaniani | 40 | 3 | 58 Can LLMs Reason Like Humans? Assessing Theory of Mind Reasoning in LLMs for Open-Ended Questions (2024) Search Agents and LLM Reasoning › Others 58 Mind Over Machine: Evaluating Theory of Mind Reasoning in LLMs and Humans (2025) Search Agents and LLM Reasoning › Others |
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| 13 | Jianfeng Dong | 38 | 3 | 100 Dual-View Curricular Optimal Transport for Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Retrieval (2024) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others 100 Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Retrieval with Noise-Robust Learning (2022) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others |
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| 14 | Wenyu Huang | 38 | 3 | 63 Retrieval Augmented Generation with Rich Answer Encoding (2023) Retrieval-Augmented Generation › Others 39 A Large-scale Offer Alignment Model for Partitioning Filtering and Matching Product Offers (2024) Entity Linking and Alignment |
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| 15 | Junjie Zhou 0001 | 38 | 3 | 60 OmniGen: Unified Image Generation (2025) Generative Models for Recommendation and Content › Others 60 CPG: Contrastive Patch-Graph learning for 3D point cloud (2026) Others |
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| 17 | Fu Zhang 0001 | 35 | 3 | 61 DEBAR: Mitigating Contextual Bias in Cross-Document Relation Extraction via Dual-Stream Decoupling (2026) Knowledge Graphs and Entity-Centric Retrieval › Others 61 Frame First, Then Extract: A Frame-Semantic Reasoning Pipeline for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction (2025) Knowledge Graphs and Entity-Centric Retrieval › Others |
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| 18 | Ori Yoran | 34 | 3 | 63 MultiModalQA: complex question answering over text, tables and images (2021) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others 60 The KoLMogorov Test: Compression by Code Generation (2025) Text Representation and Language Models › Others |
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| 19 | Julian J. McAuley | 34 | 3 | 61 Translation-based factorization machines for sequential recommendation (2018) Sequential and Session-Based Recommendation › Others 61 Translation-based Recommendation (2017) Sequential and Session-Based Recommendation › Others |
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| 20 | Navve Wasserman | 34 | 3 | 60 Paint by Inpaint: Learning to Add Image Objects by Removing Them First (2025) Generative Models for Recommendation and Content › Others 21 REAL-MM-RAG: A Real-World Multi-Modal Retrieval Benchmark (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 21 | Jimeng Sun 0001 | 33 | 3 | 64 Small Models are LLM Knowledge Triggers for Medical Tabular Prediction (2025) LLMs for Recommendation and Personalization › Others 62 Vision Language Model is NOT All You Need: Augmentation Strategies for Molecule Language Models (2024) Multimodal Large Language Models › Others |
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| 22 | Wenlin Zhang 0001 | 33 | 3 | 60 Robust kernel principal component analysis with optimal mean (2022) Others 59 Graph Convolution RPCA With Adaptive Graph (2022) Graph Neural Networks for Web and Recommendation › Others |
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| 23 | Gyuseok Lee | 33 | 3 | 60 Harmonic Dataset Distillation for Time Series Forecasting (2026) Others 23 Continual Collaborative Distillation for Recommender System (2024) Efficient and Lightweight Graph Collaborative Filtering |
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| 25 | Saber Zerhoudi | 32 | 3 | 60 The Third Search Futures Workshop at ECIR'26 (2026) Others 60 The First International Workshop on Open Web Search (WOWS) (2024) Others |
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| 26 | Jing Zhu 0005 | 32 | 3 | 100 Touch and Go: Learning from Human-Collected Vision and Touch (2022) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others 59 Mosaic of Modalities: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Graph Learning (2025) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others |
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| 27 | Xinhang Li 0001 | 31 | 3 | 60 Towards Automatic ICD Coding via Knowledge Enhanced Multi-Task Learning (2023) Others 59 Corrections to "Contrastive Graph Pooling for Explainable Classification of Brain Networks" (2024) Graph Neural Networks for Web and Recommendation › Others |
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| 28 | Weizhou Shen | 31 | 3 | 60 Mutual-Taught for Co-adapting Policy and Reward Models (2025) Others 60 Relational Graph Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2020) Others |
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| 29 | Qisheng Hu | 31 | 3 | 60 From Moments to Milestones: Incremental Timeline Summarization Leveraging Large Language Models (2024) Others 29 Just What You Desire: Constrained Timeline Summarization with Self-Reflection for Enhanced Relevance (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
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| 30 | Shijie Wang 0002 | 30 | 3 | 63 A Survey on RAG Meeting LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2024) Retrieval-Augmented Generation › Others 63 Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models: Data Management and System Design (2025) Retrieval-Augmented Generation › Others |
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| 31 | Nancy F. Chen | 30 | 3 | 62 Towards Summary Candidates Fusion (2022) Learning to Rank and Reranking › Others 60 CoAnnotating: Uncertainty-Guided Work Allocation between Human and Large Language Models for Data Annotation (2023) Text Representation and Language Models › Others |
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| 32 | Jianghong Ma | 30 | 3 | 60 Multilabel Classification With Label-Specific Features and Classifiers: A Coarse- and Fine-Tuned Framework (2021) Others 60 Topic-Based Instance and Feature Selection in Multilabel Classification (2022) Others |
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| 33 | Tingyu Song | 29 | 3 | 64 A Survey of Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Progress and Challenges (2026) Retrieval-Augmented Generation › Others 34 Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 34 | Romain Deffayet | 29 | 3 | 60 Disentangled Object-Centric Image Representation for Robotic Manipulation (2025) Others 60 Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Dual Expectile-Quantile Regression (2025) Others |
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| 35 | Xingyu Tan 0001 | 29 | 3 | 60 Higher-Order Peak Decomposition (2023) Others 22 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |