Instance-Level Composed Image Retrieval

Bill Psomas, George Retsinas, Nikos Efthymiadis, Panagiotis Filntisis, Yannis Avrithis, Petros Maragos, Ondrej Chum, Giorgos Tolias

Keywords: Image Retrieval, Composed Image Retrieval, Vision-Language Models, Transformers, Instance-Level

TL;DR: We introduce i-CIR—an instance‐level composed image retrieval benchmark with rigorously curated hard negatives—and BASIC, a training‐free VLM‐based method that centers and projects image embeddings.

Abstract:

The progress of composed image retrieval (CIR), a popular research direction in image retrieval, where a combined visual and textual query is used, is held back by the absence of high-quality training and evaluation data. We introduce a new evaluation dataset, i-CIR, which, unlike existing datasets, focuses on an instance-level class definition. The goal is to retrieve images that contain the same particular object as the visual query, presented under a variety of modifications defined by textual queries. Its design and curation process keep the dataset compact to facilitate future research, while maintaining its challenge—comparable to retrieval among more than 40M random distractors—through a semi-automated selection of hard negatives.

To overcome the challenge of obtaining clean, diverse, and suitable training data, we leverage pre-trained vision-and-language models (VLMs) in a training-free approach called BASIC. The method separately estimates query-image-to-image and query-text-to-image similarities, performing late fusion to upweight images that satisfy both queries, while down-weighting those that exhibit high
similarity with only one of the two. Each individual similarity is further improved by a set of components that are simple and intuitive. BASIC sets a new state of the art on i-CIR but also on existing CIR datasets that follow a semantic-level class definition. Project page: https://vrg.fel.cvut.cz/icir/.

Primary Area: Applications (e.g., vision, language, speech and audio, Creative AI)

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Submission Number: 21079