François Gardères

François Gardères, Shizhe Chen, Camille-Sovanneary Gauthier et al.

The composed image retrieval (CIR) task is to retrieve target images given a reference image and a modification text. Recent methods for CIR leverage large pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) and achieve good performance on general-domain concepts like color and texture. However, they still struggle with application domains like fashion, because the rich and diverse vocabulary used in fashion requires specific fine-grained vision and language understanding. An additional difficulty is the lack of large-scale fashion datasets with detailed and relevant annotations, due to the expensive cost of manual annotation by specialists. To address these challenges, we introduce FACap, a large-scale, automatically constructed fashion-domain CIR dataset. It leverages web-sourced fashion images and a two-stage annotation pipeline powered by a VLM and a large language model (LLM) to generate accurate and detailed modification texts. Then, we propose a new CIR model FashionBLIP-2, which fine-tunes the general-domain BLIP-2 model on FACap with lightweight adapters and multi-head query-candidate matching to better account for fine-grained fashion-specific information. FashionBLIP-2 is evaluated with and without additional fine-tuning on the Fashion IQ benchmark and the enhanced evaluation dataset enhFashionIQ, leveraging our pipeline to obtain higher-quality annotations. Experimental results show that the combination of FashionBLIP-2 and pretraining with FACap significantly improves the model's performance in fashion CIR especially for retrieval with fine-grained modification texts, demonstrating the value of our dataset and approach in a highly demanding environment such as e-commerce websites. Code is available at https://fgxaos.github.io/facap-paper-website/.

François Gardères, Camille-Sovanneary Gauthier, Jean Ponce et al.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve a target image that depicts a reference image modified by a textual description. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) achieve promising CIR performance by embedding images and text into a shared space for retrieval, they often fail to reason about what to preserve and what to change. This limitation hinders interpretability and yields suboptimal results, particularly in fine-grained domains like fashion. In this paper, we introduce FIRE-CIR, a model that brings compositional reasoning and interpretability to fashion CIR. Instead of relying solely on embedding similarity, FIRE-CIR performs question-driven visual reasoning: it automatically generates attribute-focused visual questions derived from the modification text, and verifies the corresponding visual evidence in both reference and candidate images. To train such a reasoning system, we automatically construct a large-scale fashion-specific visual question answering dataset, containing questions requiring either single- or dual-image analysis. During retrieval, our model leverages this explicit reasoning to re-rank candidate results, filtering out images inconsistent with the intended modifications. Experimental results on the Fashion IQ benchmark show that FIRE-CIR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in retrieval accuracy. It also provides interpretable, attribute-level insights into retrieval decisions.