Say Cheese! Detail-Preserving Portrait Collection Generation via Natural Language Edits

As social media platforms proliferate, users increasingly demand intuitive ways to create diverse, high-quality portrait collections. In this work, we introduce Portrait Collection Generation (PCG), a novel task that generates coherent portrait collections by editing a reference portrait image through natural language instructions. This task poses two unique challenges to existing methods: (1) complex multi-attribute modifications such as pose, spatial layout, and camera viewpoint; and (2) high-fidelity detail preservation including identity, clothing, and accessories. To address these challenges, we propose CHEESE, the first large-scale PCG dataset containing 24K portrait collections and 573K samples with high-quality modification text annotations, constructed through an Large Vison-Language Model-based pipeline with inversion-based verification. We further propose SCheese, a framework that combines text-guided generation with hierarchical identity and detail preservation. SCheese employs adaptive feature fusion mechanism to maintain identity consistency, and ConsistencyNet to inject fine-grained features for detail consistency. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of CHEESE in advancing PCG, with SCheese achieving state-of-the-art performance.

DanQing: An Up-to-Date Large-Scale Chinese Vision-Language Pre-training Dataset

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models demonstrate strong performance across various downstream tasks by learning from large-scale image-text pairs through contrastive pretraining. The release of extensive English image-text datasets (e.g., COYO-700M and LAION-400M) has enabled widespread adoption of models such as CLIP and SigLIP in tasks including cross-modal retrieval and image captioning. However, the advancement of Chinese vision-language pretraining has substantially lagged behind, due to the scarcity of high-quality Chinese image-text data. To address this gap, we develop a comprehensive pipeline for constructing a high-quality Chinese cross-modal dataset. As a result, we propose DanQing, which contains 100 million image-text pairs collected from Common Crawl. Different from existing datasets, DanQing is curated through a more rigorous selection process, yielding superior data quality. Moreover, DanQing is primarily built from 2024-2025 web data, enabling models to better capture evolving semantic trends and thus offering greater practical utility. We compare DanQing with existing datasets by continual pre-training of the SigLIP2 model. Experimental results show that DanQing consistently achieves superior performance across a range of Chinese downstream tasks, including zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, and LMM-based evaluations. To facilitate further research in Chinese vision-language pre-training, we will open-source the DanQing dataset under the Creative Common CC-BY 4.0 license.

CoTMR: Chain-of-Thought Multi-Scale Reasoning for Training-Free Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval

Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve target images by integrating information from a composed query (reference image and modification text) without training samples. Existing methods primarily combine caption models and large language models (LLMs) to generate target captions based on composed queries but face various issues such as incompatibility, visual information loss, and insufficient reasoning. In this work, we propose CoTMR, a training-free framework crafted for ZS-CIR with novel Chain-of-thought (CoT) and Multi-scale Reasoning. Instead of relying on caption models for modality transformation, CoTMR employs the Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to achieve unified understanding and reasoning for composed queries. To enhance the reasoning reliability, we devise CIRCoT, which guides the LVLM through a step-by-step inference process using predefined subtasks. Considering that existing approaches focus solely on global-level reasoning, our CoTMR incorporates multi-scale reasoning to achieve more comprehensive inference via fine-grained predictions about the presence or absence of key elements at the object scale. Further, we design a Multi-Grained Scoring (MGS) mechanism, which integrates CLIP similarity scores of the above reasoning outputs with candidate images to realize precise retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CoTMR not only drastically outperforms previous methods across four prominent benchmarks but also offers appealing interpretability.

Leveraging Large Vision-Language Model as User Intent-aware Encoder for Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images from candidate set using a hybrid-modality query consisting of a reference image and a relative caption that describes the user intent. Recent studies attempt to utilize Vision-Language Pre-training Models (VLPMs) with various fusion strategies for addressing the task.However, these methods typically fail to simultaneously meet two key requirements of CIR: comprehensively extracting visual information and faithfully following the user intent. In this work, we propose CIR-LVLM, a novel framework that leverages the large vision-language model (LVLM) as the powerful user intent-aware encoder to better meet these requirements. Our motivation is to explore the advanced reasoning and instruction-following capabilities of LVLM for accurately understanding and responding the user intent. Furthermore, we design a novel hybrid intent instruction module to provide explicit intent guidance at two levels: (1) The task prompt clarifies the task requirement and assists the model in discerning user intent at the task level. (2) The instance-specific soft prompt, which is adaptively selected from the learnable prompt pool, enables the model to better comprehend the user intent at the instance level compared to a universal prompt for all instances. CIR-LVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across three prominent benchmarks with acceptable inference efficiency. We believe this study provides fundamental insights into CIR-related fields.