A Comprehensive Survey on Composed Image Retrieval

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 120 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.

Pseudo-triplet Guided Few-shot Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging task that aims to retrieve the target image based on a multimodal query, i.e., a reference image and its corresponding modification text. While previous supervised or zero-shot learning paradigms all fail to strike a good trade-off between time-consuming annotation cost and retrieval performance, recent researchers introduced the task of few-shot CIR (FS-CIR) and proposed a textual inversion-based network based on pretrained CLIP model to realize it. Despite its promising performance, the approach suffers from two key limitations: insufficient multimodal query composition training and indiscriminative training triplet selection. To address these two limitations, in this work, we propose a novel two-stage pseudo triplet guided few-shot CIR scheme, dubbed PTG-FSCIR. In the first stage, we employ a masked training strategy and advanced image caption generator to construct pseudo triplets from pure image data to enable the model to acquire primary knowledge related to multimodal query composition. In the second stage, based on active learning, we design a pseudo modification text-based query-target distance metric to evaluate the challenging score for each unlabeled sample. Meanwhile, we propose a robust top range-based random sampling strategy according to the 3-$\sigma$ rule in statistics, to sample the challenging samples for fine-tuning the pretrained model. Notably, our scheme is plug-and-play and compatible with any existing supervised CIR models. We tested our scheme across three backbones on three public datasets (i.e., FashionIQ, CIRR, and Birds-to-Words), achieving maximum improvements of 26.4%, 25.5% and 21.6% respectively, demonstrating our scheme's effectiveness.

Interactive Garment Recommendation with User in the Loop

Recommending fashion items often leverages rich user profiles and makes targeted suggestions based on past history and previous purchases. In this paper, we work under the assumption that no prior knowledge is given about a user. We propose to build a user profile on the fly by integrating user reactions as we recommend complementary items to compose an outfit. We present a reinforcement learning agent capable of suggesting appropriate garments and ingesting user feedback so to improve its recommendations and maximize user satisfaction. To train such a model, we resort to a proxy model to be able to simulate having user feedback in the training loop. We experiment on the IQON3000 fashion dataset and we find that a reinforcement learning-based agent becomes capable of improving its recommendations by taking into account personal preferences. Furthermore, such task demonstrated to be hard for non-reinforcement models, that cannot exploit exploration during training.