Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（越南国家大学，胡志明市，越南）；University of Information Technology, VNU-HCM, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（信息技术大学，VNU-HCM，胡志明市，越南）
We introduce Dual Face-Hair Retrieval (DFHR), a new mixed-modality dual-reference task in image retrieval where a query consists of a face image specifying identity and a hairstyle reference expressed as either an image or text. Unlike prior retrieval settings, DFHR requires cross-component reasoning between two semantically independent attributes -- identity and hairstyle -- originating from heterogeneous modalities. This formulation demands localized feature disentanglement, cross-modal semantic alignment, and mixed-modality composition within a unified embedding space. We construct DFHR-Bench, the first benchmark for mixed-modality face-hair retrieval, comprising over 180K annotated triplets across dual-image and image-text settings, built via a multi-stage annotation protocol ensuring semantic and identity integrity. We further propose MFHC (Multimodal Face-Hair Combiner), a unified framework that fuses disentangled identity and hairstyle embeddings through token injection and multi-view supervision. DFHR and DFHR-Bench together establish a new paradigm for identity-aware, attribute-controllable visual retrieval across modalities.
In tissue characterization and cancer diagnostics, multimodal imaging has emerged as a powerful technique. Thanks to computational advances, large datasets can be exploited to discover patterns in pathologies and improve diagnosis. However, this requires efficient and scalable image retrieval methods. Cross-modality image retrieval is particularly challenging, since images of similar (or even the same) content captured by different modalities might share few common structures. We propose a new application-independent content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system for reverse (sub-)image search ac…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
This paper tackles the Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (ZS-SBIR) problem from the viewpoint of cross-modality metric learning. This task has two characteristics: 1) the zero-shot setting requires a metric space with good within-class compactness and the between-class discrepancy for recognizing the novel classes and 2) the sketch query and the photo gallery are in different modalities. The metric learning viewpoint benefits ZS-SBIR from two aspects. First, it facilitates improvement through recent good practices in deep metric learning (DML). By combining two fundamental learning approa…
Image retrieval with hybrid-modality queries, also known as composing text and image for image retrieval (CTI-IR), is a retrieval task where the search intention is expressed in a more complex query format, involving both vision and text modalities. For example, a target product image is searched using a reference product image along with text about changing certain attributes of the reference image as the query. It is a more challenging image retrieval task that requires both semantic space learning and cross-modal fusion. Previous approaches that attempt to deal with both aspects achieve uns…
Mix-Modality Person Re-Identification: A New and Practical Paradigm
School of Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学多媒体软件国家工程研究中心、人工智能研究院、计算机学院）
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）
This paper presents a three-tier modality alignment approach to learning text-image joint embedding, coined as JEMA, for cross-modal retrieval of cooking recipes and food images. The first tier improves recipe text embedding by optimizing the LSTM networks with term extraction and ranking enhanced sequence patterns, and optimizes the image embedding by combining the ResNeXt-101 image encoder with the category embedding using wideResNet-50 with word2vec. The second tier modality alignment optimizes the textual-visual joint embedding loss function using a double batch-hard triplet loss with soft…
Sketch has been employed as an effective communicative tool to express the abstract and intuitive meanings of object. Recognizing the free-hand sketch drawing is extremely useful in many real-world applications. While content-based sketch recognition has been studied for several decades, the instance-level Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (SBIR) tasks have attracted significant research attention recently. The existing datasets such as QMUL-Chair and QMUL-Shoe, focus on the retrieval tasks of chairs and shoes. However, there are several key limitations in previous instance-level SBIR works. The st…
Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (ZSSBIR) is an emerging task. The pioneering work focused on the modal gap but ignored inter-class information. Although recent work has begun to consider the triplet-based or contrast-based loss to mine inter-class information, positive and negative samples need to be carefully selected, or the model is prone to lose modality-specific information. To respond to these issues, an Ontology-Aware Network (OAN) is proposed. Specifically, the smooth inter-class independence learning mechanism is put forward to maintain inter-class peculiarity. Meanwhile, disti…
We tackle the cross-modal retrieval problem, where learning is only supervised by relevant multi-modal pairs in the data. Although the contrastive learning is the most popular approach for this task, it makes potentially wrong assumption that the instances in different pairs are automatically irrelevant. To address the issue, we propose a novel loss function that is based on self-labeling of the unknown semantic classes. Specifically, we aim to predict class labels of the data instances in each modality, and assign those labels to the corresponding instances in the other modality (i.e., swappi…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The key to address clothes-changing person re-identification (re-id) is to extract clothes-irrelevant features, e.g., face, hairstyle, body shape, and gait. Most current works mainly focus on modeling body shape from multi-modality information (e.g., silhouettes and sketches), but do not make full use of the clothes-irrelevant information in the original RGB images. In this paper, we propose a Clothes-based Adversarial Loss (CAL) to mine clothes-irrelevant features from the original RGB images by penalizing the predictive power of re-id model w.r.t. clothes. Extensive experiments demonstrate t…
Bridging the Modality Gap in Forensic Image Retrieval
Advanced Technologies Application Center (CENATAV)（先进技术应用中心（CENATAV））；Centro de Sistemas Complejos, Facultad de Física, Universidad de La Habana（哈瓦那大学物理学院复杂系统中心）
CR-JEPA: Cross-Modal Joint-Embedding Predictive Learning for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval
Space Applications Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation（印度空间研究组织空间应用中心）；Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买资源工程研究中心）
Guangzhou University（广州大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Visible-infrared cross-modality person re-identification (VI-ReID), whose aim is to match person images between visible and infrared modality, is a challenging cross-modality image retrieval task. Most existing works integrate batch normalization layers into their neural network, but we found out that batch normalization layers would lead to two types of distribution gap: 1) inter-mini-batch distribution gap -- the distribution gap of the same modality between each mini-batch; 2) intra-mini-batch modality distribution gap -- the distribution gap of different modality within the same mini-batch…
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Representation learning for sketch-based image retrieval has mostly been tackled by learning embeddings that discard modality-specific information. As instances from different modalities can often provide complementary information describing the underlying concept, we propose a cross-attention framework for Vision Transformers (XModalViT) that fuses modality-specific information instead of discarding them. Our framework first maps paired datapoints from the individual photo and sketch modalities to fused representations that unify information from both modalities. We then decouple the input sp…
College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机学院）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）；Institute of Marine Sensing and Networking, Zhejiang University（浙江大学海洋感知与网络研究所）；Key Laboratory of Ocean Observation-Imaging Testbed of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang University（浙江省海洋观测-成像试验重点实验室）
In this paper, we study the cross-modal image retrieval, where the inputs contain a source image plus some text that describes certain modifications to this image and the desired image. Prior work usually uses a three-stage strategy to tackle this task: 1) extract the features of the inputs; 2) fuse the feature of the source image and its modified text to obtain fusion feature; 3) learn a similarity metric between the desired image and the source image + modified text by using deep metric learning. Since classical image/text encoders can learn the useful representation and common pair-based lo…
Many previous methods on text-based person retrieval tasks are devoted to learning a latent common space mapping, with the purpose of extracting modality-invariant features from both visual and textual modality. Nevertheless, due to the complexity of high-dimensional data, the unconstrained mapping paradigms are not able to properly catch discriminative clues about the corresponding person while drop the misaligned information. Intuitively, the information contained in visual data can be divided into person information (PI) and surroundings information (SI), which are mutually exclusive from e…
The development of cross-modal retrieval systems that can search and retrieve semantically relevant data across different modalities based on a query in any modality has attracted great attention in remote sensing (RS). In this paper, we focus our attention on cross-modal text-image retrieval, where queries from one modality (e.g., text) can be matched to archive entries from another (e.g., image). Most of the existing cross-modal text-image retrieval systems in RS require a high number of labeled training samples and also do not allow fast and memory-efficient retrieval. These issues limit th…
Due to the availability of large-scale multi-modal data (e.g., satellite images acquired by different sensors, text sentences, etc) archives, the development of cross-modal retrieval systems that can search and retrieve semantically relevant data across different modalities based on a query in any modality has attracted great attention in RS. In this paper, we focus our attention on cross-modal text-image retrieval, where queries from one modality (e.g., text) can be matched to archive entries from another (e.g., image). Most of the existing cross-modal text-image retrieval systems require a h…
Autonomous University of Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
In this work we introduce a cross modal image retrieval system that allows both text and sketch as input modalities for the query. A cross-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model the sketch and text input modalities as well as the the image output modality, learning a common embedding between text and images and between sketches and images. In addition, an attention model is used to selectively focus the attention on the different objects of the image, allowing for retrieval with multiple objects in the query. Experiments show that the proposed method performs the best i…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
In this paper we address the problem of learning robust cross-domain representations for sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR). While most SBIR approaches focus on extracting low- and mid-level descriptors for direct feature matching, recent works have shown the benefit of learning coupled feature representations to describe data from two related sources. However, cross-domain representation learning methods are typically cast into non-convex minimization problems that are difficult to optimize, leading to unsatisfactory performance. Inspired by self-paced learning, a learning methodology design…
Due to the large cross-modality discrepancy between 2D sketches and 3D shapes, retrieving 3D shapes by sketches is a significantly challenging task. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework to learn a discriminative deep cross-modality adaptation model in this paper. Specifically, we first separately adopt two metric networks, following two deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), to learn modality-specific discriminative features based on an importance-aware metric learning method. Subsequently, we explicitly introduce a cross-modality transformation network to compensate for t…
School of Computer Science and Communication Engineering, Jiangsu University（江苏大学计算机科学与通信工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学人工智能学院）
Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification (VI-ReID) is a challenging retrieval task under complex modality changes. Existing methods usually focus on extracting discriminative visual features while ignoring the reliability and commonality of visual features between different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework named Progressive Modality-shared Transformer (PMT) for effective VI-ReID. To reduce the negative effect of modality gaps, we first take the gray-scale images as an auxiliary modality and propose a progressive learning strategy. Then, we propose a Modali…
Image retrieval with natural language feedback offers the promise of catalog search based on fine-grained visual features that go beyond objects and binary attributes, facilitating real-world applications such as e-commerce. Our Modality-Agnostic Attention Fusion (MAAF) model combines image and text features and outperforms existing approaches on two visual search with modifying phrase datasets, Fashion IQ and CSS, and performs competitively on a dataset with only single-word modifications, Fashion200k. We also introduce two new challenging benchmarks adapted from Birds-to-Words and Spot-the-D…
Pre-training on large scale unlabelled datasets has shown impressive performance improvements in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. Given the advent of large-scale instructional video datasets, a common strategy for pre-training video encoders is to use the accompanying speech as weak supervision. However, as speech is used to supervise the pre-training, it is never seen by the video encoder, which does not learn to process that modality. We address this drawback of current pre-training methods, which fail to exploit the rich cues in spoken language. Our proposal is…
University of Insubria（因苏布里亚大学）；National University of Sciences and Technology（国立科技大学）
This paper proposes a cross-modal retrieval system that leverages on image and text encoding. Most multimodal architectures employ separate networks for each modality to capture the semantic relationship between them. However, in our work image-text encoding can achieve comparable results in terms of cross-modal retrieval without having to use a separate network for each modality. We show that text encodings can capture semantic relationships between multiple modalities. In our knowledge, this work is the first of its kind in terms of employing a single network and fused image-text embedding f…
Text-based person retrieval aims to find the query person based on a textual description. The key is to learn a common latent space mapping between visual-textual modalities. To achieve this goal, existing works employ segmentation to obtain explicitly cross-modal alignments or utilize attention to explore salient alignments. These methods have two shortcomings: 1) Labeling cross-modal alignments are time-consuming. 2) Attention methods can explore salient cross-modal alignments but may ignore some subtle and valuable pairs. To relieve these issues, we introduce an Implicit Visual-Textual (IVT…
Video search has become the main routine for users to discover videos relevant to a text query on large short-video sharing platforms. During training a query-video bi-encoder model using online search logs, we identify a modality bias phenomenon that the video encoder almost entirely relies on text matching, neglecting other modalities of the videos such as vision, audio. This modality imbalanceresults from a) modality gap: the relevance between a query and a video text is much easier to learn as the query is also a piece of text, with the same modality as the video text; b) data bias: most t…
Accurately matching visual and textual data in cross-modal retrieval has been widely studied in the multimedia community. To address these challenges posited by the heterogeneity gap and the semantic gap, we propose integrating Shannon information theory and adversarial learning. In terms of the heterogeneity gap, we integrate modality classification and information entropy maximization adversarially. For this purpose, a modality classifier (as a discriminator) is built to distinguish the text and image modalities according to their different statistical properties. This discriminator uses its…
Visual appearance is considered to be the most important cue to understand images for cross-modal retrieval, while sometimes the scene text appearing in images can provide valuable information to understand the visual semantics. Most of existing cross-modal retrieval approaches ignore the usage of scene text information and directly adding this information may lead to performance degradation in scene text free scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a full transformer architecture to unify these cross-modal retrieval scenarios in a single $\textbf{Vi}$sion and $\textbf{S}$cene $\textbf{T}…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Thanks to the success of deep learning, cross-modal retrieval has made significant progress recently. However, there still remains a crucial bottleneck: how to bridge the modality gap to further enhance the retrieval accuracy. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised adversarial hashing (\textbf{SSAH}) approach, which lies among the early attempts to incorporate adversarial learning into cross-modal hashing in a self-supervised fashion. The primary contribution of this work is that two adversarial networks are leveraged to maximize the semantic correlation and consistency of the representat…
