TRACE: Transform Aggregate and Compose Visiolinguistic Representations for Image Search with Text Feedback

The ability to efficiently search for images over an indexed database is the cornerstone for several user experiences. Incorporating user feedback, through multi-modal inputs provide flexible and interaction to serve fine-grained specificity in requirements. We specifically focus on text feedback, through descriptive natural language queries. Given a reference image and textual user feedback, our goal is to retrieve images that satisfy constraints specified by both of these input modalities. The task is challenging as it requires understanding the textual semantics from the text feedback and then applying these changes to the visual representation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel architecture TRACE which contains a hierarchical feature aggregation module to learn the composite visio-linguistic representations. TRACE achieves the SOTA performance on 3 benchmark datasets: FashionIQ, Shoes, and Birds-to-Words, with an average improvement of at least ~5.7%, ~3%, and ~5% respectively in R@K metric. Our extensive experiments and ablation studies show that TRACE consistently outperforms the existing techniques by significant margins both quantitatively and qualitatively.