Yoohoon Kang

Geonmo Gu, Sanghyuk Chun, Wonjae Kim et al.

This paper proposes a novel diffusion-based model, CompoDiff, for solving zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) with latent diffusion. This paper also introduces a new synthetic dataset, named SynthTriplets18M, with 18.8 million reference images, conditions, and corresponding target image triplets to train CIR models. CompoDiff and SynthTriplets18M tackle the shortages of the previous CIR approaches, such as poor generalizability due to the small dataset scale and the limited types of conditions. CompoDiff not only achieves a new state-of-the-art on four ZS-CIR benchmarks, including FashionIQ, CIRR, CIRCO, and GeneCIS, but also enables a more versatile and controllable CIR by accepting various conditions, such as negative text, and image mask conditions. CompoDiff also shows the controllability of the condition strength between text and image queries and the trade-off between inference speed and performance, which are unavailable with existing CIR methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/navervision/CompoDiff

Geonmo Gu, Byeongho Heo, Jaemyung Yu et al.

Universal Multimodal embedding models built on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have traditionally employed contrastive learning, which aligns representations of query-target pairs across different modalities. Yet, despite its empirical success, they are primarily built on a "single-turn" formulation where each query-target pair is treated as an independent data point. This paradigm leads to computational inefficiency when scaling, as it requires a separate forward pass for each pair and overlooks potential contextual relationships between multiple queries that can relate to the same context. In this work, we introduce Multi-Turn Contrastive Learning (MuCo), a dialogue-inspired framework that revisits this process. MuCo leverages the conversational nature of MLLMs to process multiple, related query-target pairs associated with a single image within a single forward pass. This allows us to extract a set of multiple query and target embeddings simultaneously, conditioned on a shared context representation, amplifying the effective batch size and overall training efficiency. Experiments exhibit MuCo with a newly curated 5M multimodal multi-turn dataset (M3T), which yields state-of-the-art retrieval performance on MMEB and M-BEIR benchmarks, while markedly enhancing both training efficiency and representation coherence across modalities. Code and M3T are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/muco

Geonmo Gu, Sanghyuk Chun, Wonjae Kim et al.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) task takes a composed query of image and text, aiming to search relative images for both conditions. Conventional CIR approaches need a training dataset composed of triplets of query image, query text, and target image, which is very expensive to collect. Several recent works have worked on the zero-shot (ZS) CIR paradigm to tackle the issue without using pre-collected triplets. However, the existing ZS-CIR methods show limited backbone scalability and generalizability due to the lack of diversity of the input texts during training. We propose a novel CIR framework, only using language for its training. Our LinCIR (Language-only training for CIR) can be trained only with text datasets by a novel self-supervision named self-masking projection (SMP). We project the text latent embedding to the token embedding space and construct a new text by replacing the keyword tokens of the original text. Then, we let the new and original texts have the same latent embedding vector. With this simple strategy, LinCIR is surprisingly efficient and highly effective; LinCIR with CLIP ViT-G backbone is trained in 48 minutes and shows the best ZS-CIR performances on four different CIR benchmarks, CIRCO, GeneCIS, FashionIQ, and CIRR, even outperforming supervised method on FashionIQ. Code is available at https://github.com/navervision/lincir