CoLLM: A Large Language Model for Composed Image Retrieval
Authors: name: Chuong Huynh; name: Jinyu Yang; name: Ashish Tawari; name: Mubarak Shah; name: Son Tran; name: Raffay Hamid; name: Trishul Chilimbi; name: Abhinav Shrivastava
Published: 2025-03-25 17:59:50

Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a complex task that aims to retrieve images
based on a multimodal query. Typical training data consists of triplets
containing a reference image, a textual description of desired modifications,
and the target image, which are expensive and time-consuming to acquire. The
scarcity of CIR datasets has led to zero-shot approaches utilizing synthetic
triplets or leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) with ubiquitous
web-crawled image-caption pairs. However, these methods have significant
limitations: synthetic triplets suffer from limited scale, lack of diversity,
and unnatural modification text, while image-caption pairs hinder joint
embedding learning of the multimodal query due to the absence of triplet data.
Moreover, existing approaches struggle with complex and nuanced modification
texts that demand sophisticated fusion and understanding of vision and language
modalities. We present CoLLM, a one-stop framework that effectively addresses
these limitations. Our approach generates triplets on-the-fly from
image-caption pairs, enabling supervised training without manual annotation. We
leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate joint embeddings of reference
images and modification texts, facilitating deeper multimodal fusion.
Additionally, we introduce Multi-Text CIR (MTCIR), a large-scale dataset
comprising 3.4M samples, and refine existing CIR benchmarks (CIRR and
Fashion-IQ) to enhance evaluation reliability. Experimental results demonstrate
that CoLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple CIR benchmarks
and settings. MTCIR yields competitive results, with up to 15% performance
improvement. Our refined benchmarks provide more reliable evaluation metrics
for CIR models, contributing to the advancement of this important field.