Generative Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a vision-language task utilizing queries comprising images and textual descriptions to achieve precise image retrieval. This task seeks to find images that are visually similar to a reference image and incorporate specific changes or features described textually (visual delta). CIR enables a more flexible and user-specific retrieval by bridging visual data with verbal instructions. This paper introduces a novel generative method that augments Composed Image Retrieval by Composed Image Generation (CIG) to provide pseudo-target images. CIG utilizes a textual inversion network to map reference images into semantic word space, which generates pseudo-target images in combination with textual descriptions. These images serve as additional visual information, significantly improving the accuracy and relevance of retrieved images when integrated into existing retrieval frameworks. Experiments conducted across multiple CIR datasets and several baseline methods demonstrate improvements in retrieval performance, which shows the potential of our approach as an effective add-on for existing composed image retrieval.