The rapid growth of dataset scales has been a key driver in advancing deep learning research. However, as dataset scale increases, the training process becomes increasingly inefficient due to the presence of low-value samples, including excessive redundant samples, overly challenging samples, and inefficient easy samples that contribute little to model improvement.To address this challenge, we propose Scale Efficient Training (SeTa) for large datasets, a dynamic sample pruning approach that losslessly reduces training time. To remove low-value samples, SeTa first performs random pruning to eliminate redundant samples, then clusters the remaining samples according to their learning difficulty measured by loss. Building upon this clustering, a sliding window strategy is employed to progressively remove both overly challenging and inefficient easy clusters following an easy-to-hard curriculum.We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale synthetic datasets, including ToCa, SS1M, and ST+MJ, each containing over 3 million samples.SeTa reduces training costs by up to 50\% while maintaining or improving performance, with minimal degradation even at 70\% cost reduction. Furthermore, experiments on various scale real datasets across various backbones (CNNs, Transformers, and Mambas) and diverse tasks (instruction tuning, multi-view stereo, geo-localization, composed image retrieval, referring image segmentation) demonstrate the powerful effectiveness and universality of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/mrazhou/SeTa.
Can our brain signals faithfully reflect the original visual stimuli, even including high-frequency details? Although human perceptual and cognitive capacities enable us to process and remember visual information, these abilities are constrained by several factors, such as limited attentional resources and the finite capacity of visual memory. When visual stimuli are processed by human visual system into brain signals, some information is inevitably lost, leading to a discrepancy known as the \textbf{System GAP}. Additionally, perceptual and cognitive dynamics, along with technical noise in signal acquisition, degrade the fidelity of brain signals relative to the visual stimuli, known as the \textbf{Random GAP}. When encoded brain representations are directly aligned with the corresponding pretrained image features, the System GAP and Random GAP between paired data challenge the model, requiring it to bridge these gaps. However, in the context of limited paired data, these gaps are difficult for the model to learn, leading to overfitting and poor generalization to new data. To address these GAPs, we propose a simple yet effective approach called the \textbf{Uncertainty-aware Blur Prior (UBP)}. It estimates the uncertainty within the paired data, reflecting the mismatch between brain signals and visual stimuli. Based on this uncertainty, UBP dynamically blurs the high-frequency details of the original images, reducing the impact of the mismatch and improving alignment. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of \textbf{50.9\%} and a top-5 accuracy of \textbf{79.7\%} on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by margins of \textbf{13.7\%} and \textbf{9.8\%}, respectively. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/HaitaoWuTJU/Uncertainty-aware-Blur-Prior}{GitHub}.
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images from a gallery based on a reference image and modification text as a combined query. Recent approaches focus on balancing global information from two modalities and encode the query into a unified feature for retrieval. However, due to insufficient attention to fine-grained details, these coarse fusion methods often struggle with handling subtle visual alterations or intricate textual instructions. In this work, we propose DetailFusion, a novel dual-branch framework that effectively coordinates information across global and detailed granularities, thereby enabling detail-enhanced CIR. Our approach leverages atomic detail variation priors derived from an image editing dataset, supplemented by a detail-oriented optimization strategy to develop a Detail-oriented Inference Branch. Furthermore, we design an Adaptive Feature Compositor that dynamically fuses global and detailed features based on fine-grained information of each unique multimodal query. Extensive experiments and ablation analyses not only demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both CIRR and FashionIQ datasets but also validate the effectiveness and cross-domain adaptability of detail enhancement for CIR.
The Wasserstein metric has become increasingly important in many machine learning applications such as generative modeling, image retrieval and domain adaptation. Despite its appeal, it is often too costly to compute. This has motivated approximation methods like entropy-regularized optimal transport, downsampling, and subsampling, which trade accuracy for computational efficiency. In this paper, we consider the challenge of computing efficient approximations to the Wasserstein metric that also serve as strict upper or lower bounds. Focusing on discrete measures on regular grids, our approach involves formulating and exactly solving a Kantorovich problem on a coarse grid using a quantized measure and specially designed cost matrix, followed by an upscaling and correction stage. This is done either in the primal or dual space to obtain valid upper and lower bounds on the Wasserstein metric of the full-resolution inputs. We evaluate our methods on the DOTmark optimal transport images benchmark, demonstrating a 10x-100x speedup compared to entropy-regularized OT while keeping the approximation error below 2%.
Composed image retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving a target image specified by a query image and a relative text that describes a semantic modification to the query image. Existing methods in CIR struggle to accurately represent the image and the text modification, resulting in subpar performance. To address this limitation, we introduce a CIR framework, ConText-CIR, trained with a Text Concept-Consistency loss that encourages the representations of noun phrases in the text modification to better attend to the relevant parts of the query image. To support training with this loss function, we also propose a synthetic data generation pipeline that creates training data from existing CIR datasets or unlabeled images. We show that these components together enable stronger performance on CIR tasks, setting a new state-of-the-art in composed image retrieval in both the supervised and zero-shot settings on multiple benchmark datasets, including CIRR and CIRCO. Source code, model checkpoints, and our new datasets are available at https://github.com/mvrl/ConText-CIR.
Text-to-Image Retrieval (T2IR) is a highly valuable task that aims to match a given textual query to images in a gallery. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on textual queries describing overall image semantics or foreground salient objects, possibly overlooking inconspicuous small objects, especially in complex environments. Such small object retrieval is crucial, as in real-world applications, the targets of interest are not always prominent in the image. Thus, we introduce SORCE (Small Object Retrieval in Complex Environments), a new subfield of T2IR, focusing on retrieving small objects in complex images with textual queries. We propose a new benchmark, SORCE-1K, consisting of images with complex environments and textual queries describing less conspicuous small objects with minimal contextual cues from other salient objects. Preliminary analysis on SORCE-1K finds that existing T2IR methods struggle to capture small objects and encode all the semantics into a single embedding, leading to poor retrieval performance on SORCE-1K. Therefore, we propose to represent each image with multiple distinctive embeddings. We leverage Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to extract multiple embeddings for each image instructed by a set of Regional Prompts (ReP). Experimental results show that our multi-embedding approach through MLLM and ReP significantly outperforms existing T2IR methods on SORCE-1K. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of SORCE-1K for benchmarking SORCE performances, highlighting the potential of multi-embedding representation and text-customized MLLM features for addressing this task.
Feature matching dominats the time costs in structure from motion (SfM). The primary contribution of this study is a GPU data schedule algorithm for efficient feature matching of Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. The core idea is to divide the whole dataset into blocks based on the matrix band reduction (MBR) and achieve efficient feature matching via GPU-accelerated cascade hashing. First, match pairs are selected by using an image retrieval technique, which converts images into global descriptors and searches high-dimension nearest neighbors with graph indexing. Second, compact image blocks are iteratively generated from a MBR-based data schedule strategy, which exploits image connections to avoid redundant data IO (input/output) burden and increases the usage of GPU computing power. Third, guided by the generated image blocks, feature matching is executed sequentially within the framework of GPU-accelerated cascade hashing, and initial candidate matches are refined by combining a local geometric constraint and RANSAC-based global verification. For further performance improvement, these two seps are designed to execute parallelly in GPU and CPU. Finally, the performance of the proposed solution is evaluated by using large-scale UAV datasets. The results demonstrate that it increases the efficiency of feature matching with speedup ratios ranging from 77.0 to 100.0 compared with KD-Tree based matching methods, and achieves comparable accuracy in relative and absolute bundle adjustment (BA). The proposed algorithm is an efficient solution for feature matching of UAV images.
As sketch research has collectively matured over time, its adaptation for at-mass commercialisation emerges on the immediate horizon. Despite an already mature research endeavour for photos, there is no research on the efficient inference specifically designed for sketch data. In this paper, we first demonstrate existing state-of-the-art efficient light-weight models designed for photos do not work on sketches. We then propose two sketch-specific components which work in a plug-n-play manner on any photo efficient network to adapt them to work on sketch data. We specifically chose fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) as a demonstrator as the most recognised sketch problem with immediate commercial value. Technically speaking, we first propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation network to transfer existing photo efficient networks to be compatible with sketch, which brings down number of FLOPs and model parameters by 97.96% percent and 84.89% respectively. We then exploit the abstract trait of sketch to introduce a RL-based canvas selector that dynamically adjusts to the abstraction level which further cuts down number of FLOPs by two thirds. The end result is an overall reduction of 99.37% of FLOPs (from 40.18G to 0.254G) when compared with a full network, while retaining the accuracy (33.03% vs 32.77%) -- finally making an efficient network for the sparse sketch data that exhibit even fewer FLOPs than the best photo counterpart.
We propose Visualize-then-Retrieve (VisRet), a new paradigm for Text-to-Image (T2I) retrieval that mitigates the limitations of cross-modal similarity alignment of existing multi-modal embeddings. VisRet first projects textual queries into the image modality via T2I generation. Then, it performs retrieval within the image modality to bypass the weaknesses of cross-modal retrievers in recognizing subtle visual-spatial features. Experiments on three knowledge-intensive T2I retrieval benchmarks, including a newly introduced multi-entity benchmark, demonstrate that VisRet consistently improves T2I retrieval by 24.5% to 32.7% NDCG@10 across different embedding models. VisRet also significantly benefits downstream visual question answering accuracy when used in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. The method is plug-and-play and compatible with off-the-shelf retrievers, making it an effective module for knowledge-intensive multi-modal systems. Our code and the new benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/xiaowu0162/Visualize-then-Retrieve.
Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve target images given a compositional query, consisting of a reference image and a modifying text-without relying on annotated training data. Existing approaches often generate a synthetic target text using large language models (LLMs) to serve as an intermediate anchor between the compositional query and the target image. Models are then trained to align the compositional query with the generated text, and separately align images with their corresponding texts using contrastive learning. However, this reliance on intermediate text introduces error propagation, as inaccuracies in query-to-text and text-to-image mappings accumulate, ultimately degrading retrieval performance. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework by employing a Multimodal Reasoning Agent (MRA) for ZS-CIR. MRA eliminates the dependence on textual intermediaries by directly constructing triplets, <reference image, modification text, target image>, using only unlabeled image data. By training on these synthetic triplets, our model learns to capture the relationships between compositional queries and candidate images directly. Extensive experiments on three standard CIR benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. On the FashionIQ dataset, our method improves Average R@10 by at least 7.5\% over existing baselines; on CIRR, it boosts R@1 by 9.6\%; and on CIRCO, it increases mAP@5 by 9.5\%.
The diagram is a visual representation of a relationship illustrated with edges (lines or arrows), which is widely used in industrial and scientific communication. Although recognizing diagrams is essential for vision language models (VLMs) to comprehend domain-specific knowledge, recent studies reveal that many VLMs fail to identify edges in images. We hypothesize that these failures stem from an over-reliance on textual and positional biases, preventing VLMs from learning explicit edge features. Based on this idea, we empirically investigate whether the image encoder in VLMs can learn edge representation through training on a diagram dataset in which edges are biased neither by textual nor positional information. To this end, we conduct contrastive learning on an artificially generated diagram--caption dataset to train an image encoder and evaluate its diagram-related features on three tasks: probing, image retrieval, and captioning. Our results show that the finetuned model outperforms pretrained CLIP in all tasks and surpasses zero-shot GPT-4o and LLaVA-Mistral in the captioning task. These findings confirm that eliminating textual and positional biases fosters accurate edge recognition in VLMs, offering a promising path for advancing diagram understanding.
Existing Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) methods typically train adapters that convert reference images into pseudo-text tokens, which are concatenated with the modifying text and processed by frozen text encoders in pretrained VLMs or LLMs. While this design leverages the strengths of large pretrained models, it only supervises the adapter to produce encoder-compatible tokens that loosely preserve visual semantics. Crucially, it does not directly optimize the composed query representation to capture the full intent of the composition or to align with the target semantics, thereby limiting retrieval performance, particularly in cases involving fine-grained or complex visual transformations. To address this problem, we propose MLLM-Guided VLM Fine-Tuning with Joint Inference (MVFT-JI), a novel approach that leverages a pretrained multimodal large language model (MLLM) to construct two complementary training tasks using only unlabeled images: target text retrieval taskand text-to-image retrieval task. By jointly optimizing these tasks, our method enables the VLM to inherently acquire robust compositional retrieval capabilities, supported by the provided theoretical justifications and empirical validation. Furthermore, during inference, we further prompt the MLLM to generate target texts from composed queries and compute retrieval scores by integrating similarities between (i) the composed query and candidate images, and (ii) the MLLM-generated target text and candidate images. This strategy effectively combines the VLM's semantic alignment strengths with the MLLM's reasoning capabilities.
Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated strong performance across a range of downstream tasks. However, CLIP is still limited in negation understanding: the ability to recognize the absence or exclusion of a concept. Existing methods address the problem by using a large language model (LLM) to generate large-scale data of image captions containing negation for further fine-tuning CLIP. However, these methods are both time- and compute-intensive, and their evaluations are typically restricted to image-text matching tasks. To expand the horizon, we (1) introduce a training-time negation data generation pipeline such that negation captions are generated during the training stage, which only increases 2.5% extra training time, and (2) we propose the first benchmark, Neg-TtoI, for evaluating text-to-image generation models on prompts containing negation, assessing model's ability to produce semantically accurate images. We show that our proposed method, TNG-CLIP, achieves SOTA performance on diverse negation benchmarks of image-to-text matching, text-to-image retrieval, and image generation.
Person re-identification (ReID) models are known to suffer from camera bias, where learned representations cluster according to camera viewpoints rather than identity, leading to significant performance degradation under (inter-camera) domain shifts in real-world surveillance systems when new cameras are added to camera networks. State-of-the-art test-time adaptation (TTA) methods, largely designed for classification tasks, rely on classification entropy-based objectives that fail to generalize well to ReID, thus making them unsuitable for tackling camera bias. In this paper, we introduce DART$^3$, a TTA framework specifically designed to mitigate camera-induced domain shifts in person ReID. DART$^3$ (Distance-Aware Retrieval Tuning at Test Time) leverages a distance-based objective that aligns better with image retrieval tasks like ReID by exploiting the correlation between nearest-neighbor distance and prediction error. Unlike prior ReID-specific domain adaptation methods, DART$^3$ requires no source data, architectural modifications, or retraining, and can be deployed in both fully black-box and hybrid settings. Empirical evaluations on multiple ReID benchmarks indicate that DART$^3$ and DART$^3$ LITE, a lightweight alternative to the approach, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art TTA baselines, making for a viable option to online learning to mitigate the adverse effects of camera bias.
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved widespread success yet remain prone to adversarial attacks. Typically, such attacks either involve frequent queries to the target model or rely on surrogate models closely mirroring the target model -- often trained with subsets of the target model's training data -- to achieve high attack success rates through transferability. However, in realistic scenarios where training data is inaccessible and excessive queries can raise alarms, crafting adversarial examples becomes more challenging. In this paper, we present UnivIntruder, a novel attack framework that relies solely on a single, publicly available CLIP model and publicly available datasets. By using textual concepts, UnivIntruder generates universal, transferable, and targeted adversarial perturbations that mislead DNNs into misclassifying inputs into adversary-specified classes defined by textual concepts. Our extensive experiments show that our approach achieves an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of up to 85% on ImageNet and over 99% on CIFAR-10, significantly outperforming existing transfer-based methods. Additionally, we reveal real-world vulnerabilities, showing that even without querying target models, UnivIntruder compromises image search engines like Google and Baidu with ASR rates up to 84%, and vision language models like GPT-4 and Claude-3.5 with ASR rates up to 80%. These findings underscore the practicality of our attack in scenarios where traditional avenues are blocked, highlighting the need to reevaluate security paradigms in AI applications.
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is aimed at predicting the location of a query image by referencing a database of geotagged images. For VPR task, often fewer discriminative local regions in an image produce important effects while mundane background regions do not contribute or even cause perceptual aliasing because of easy overlap. However, existing methods lack precisely modeling and full exploitation of these discriminative regions. In this paper, we propose the Focus on Local (FoL) approach to stimulate the performance of image retrieval and re-ranking in VPR simultaneously by mining and exploiting reliable discriminative local regions in images and introducing pseudo-correlation supervision. First, we design two losses, Extraction-Aggregation Spatial Alignment Loss (SAL) and Foreground-Background Contrast Enhancement Loss (CEL), to explicitly model reliable discriminative local regions and use them to guide the generation of global representations and efficient re-ranking. Second, we introduce a weakly-supervised local feature training strategy based on pseudo-correspondences obtained from aggregating global features to alleviate the lack of local correspondences ground truth for the VPR task. Third, we suggest an efficient re-ranking pipeline that is efficiently and precisely based on discriminative region guidance. Finally, experimental results show that our FoL achieves the state-of-the-art on multiple VPR benchmarks in both image retrieval and re-ranking stages and also significantly outperforms existing two-stage VPR methods in terms of computational efficiency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenshunpeng/FoL
While an image is worth more than a thousand words, only a few provide crucial information for a given task and thus should be focused on. In light of this, ideal text-to-image (T2I) retrievers should prioritize specific visual attributes relevant to queries. To evaluate current retrievers on handling attribute-focused queries, we build COCO-Facet, a COCO-based benchmark with 9,112 queries about diverse attributes of interest. We find that CLIP-like retrievers, which are widely adopted due to their efficiency and zero-shot ability, have poor and imbalanced performance, possibly because their image embeddings focus on global semantics and subjects while leaving out other details. Notably, we reveal that even recent Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based, stronger retrievers with a larger output dimension struggle with this limitation. Hence, we hypothesize that retrieving with general image embeddings is suboptimal for performing such queries. As a solution, we propose to use promptable image embeddings enabled by these multimodal retrievers, which boost performance by highlighting required attributes. Our pipeline for deriving such embeddings generalizes across query types, image pools, and base retriever architectures. To enhance real-world applicability, we offer two acceleration strategies: Pre-processing promptable embeddings and using linear approximations. We show that the former yields a 15% improvement in Recall@5 when prompts are predefined, while the latter achieves an 8% improvement when prompts are only available during inference.
Despite the dominance of convolutional and transformer-based architectures in image-to-image retrieval, these models are prone to biases arising from low-level visual features, such as color. Recognizing the lack of semantic understanding as a key limitation, we propose a novel scene graph-based retrieval framework that emphasizes semantic content over superficial image characteristics. Prior approaches to scene graph retrieval predominantly rely on supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which require ground truth graph pairs driven from image captions. However, the inconsistency of caption-based supervision stemming from variable text encodings undermine retrieval reliability. To address these, we present SCENIR, a Graph Autoencoder-based unsupervised retrieval framework, which eliminates the dependence on labeled training data. Our model demonstrates superior performance across metrics and runtime efficiency, outperforming existing vision-based, multimodal, and supervised GNN approaches. We further advocate for Graph Edit Distance (GED) as a deterministic and robust ground truth measure for scene graph similarity, replacing the inconsistent caption-based alternatives for the first time in image-to-image retrieval evaluation. Finally, we validate the generalizability of our method by applying it to unannotated datasets via automated scene graph generation, while substantially contributing in advancing state-of-the-art in counterfactual image retrieval.
Current text-to-image (T2I) generation models achieve promising results, but they fail on the scenarios where the knowledge implied in the text prompt is uncertain. For example, a T2I model released in February would struggle to generate a suitable poster for a movie premiering in April, because the character designs and styles are uncertain to the model. To solve this problem, we propose an Internet-Augmented text-to-image generation (IA-T2I) framework to compel T2I models clear about such uncertain knowledge by providing them with reference images. Specifically, an active retrieval module is designed to determine whether a reference image is needed based on the given text prompt; a hierarchical image selection module is introduced to find the most suitable image returned by an image search engine to enhance the T2I model; a self-reflection mechanism is presented to continuously evaluate and refine the generated image to ensure faithful alignment with the text prompt. To evaluate the proposed framework's performance, we collect a dataset named Img-Ref-T2I, where text prompts include three types of uncertain knowledge: (1) known but rare. (2) unknown. (3) ambiguous. Moreover, we carefully craft a complex prompt to guide GPT-4o in making preference evaluation, which has been shown to have an evaluation accuracy similar to that of human preference evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, outperforming GPT-4o by about 30% in human evaluation.
Additive manufacturing enables the fabrication of complex designs while minimizing waste, but faces challenges related to defects and process anomalies. This study presents a novel multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation-based framework that automates anomaly detection across various Additive Manufacturing processes leveraging retrieved information from literature, including images and descriptive text, rather than training datasets. This framework integrates text and image retrieval from scientific literature and multimodal generation models to perform zero-shot anomaly identification, classification, and explanation generation in a Laser Powder Bed Fusion setting. The proposed framework is evaluated on four L-PBF manufacturing datasets from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, featuring various printer makes, models, and materials. This evaluation demonstrates the framework's adaptability and generalizability across diverse images without requiring additional training. Comparative analysis using Qwen2-VL-2B and GPT-4o-mini as MLLM within the proposed framework highlights that GPT-4o-mini outperforms Qwen2-VL-2B and proportional random baseline in manufacturing anomalies classification. Additionally, the evaluation of the RAG system confirms that incorporating retrieval mechanisms improves average accuracy by 12% by reducing the risk of hallucination and providing additional information. The proposed framework can be continuously updated by integrating emerging research, allowing seamless adaptation to the evolving landscape of AM technologies. This scalable, automated, and zero-shot-capable framework streamlines AM anomaly analysis, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.