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arXiv · 2511.22253

UNION: A Lightweight Target Representation for Efficient Zero-Shot Image-Guided Retrieval with Optional Textual Queries

Hoang-Bao Le·Allie Tran·Binh T. Nguyen·Liting Zhou·Cathal Gurrin
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Abstract

Image-Guided Retrieval with Optional Text (IGROT) is a general retrieval setting where a query consists of an anchor image, with or without accompanying text, aiming to retrieve semantically relevant target images. This formulation unifies two major tasks: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) and Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (SBIR). In this work, we address IGROT under low-data supervision by introducing UNION, a lightweight and generalisable target representation that fuses the image embedding with a null-text prompt. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on fixed target features, UNION enhances semantic alignment with multimodal queries while requiring no architectural modifications to pretrained vision-language models. With only 5,000 training samples - from LlavaSCo for CIR and Training-Sketchy for SBIR - our method achieves competitive results across benchmarks, including CIRCO mAP@50 of 38.5 and Sketchy mAP@200 of 82.7, surpassing many heavily supervised baselines. This demonstrates the robustness and efficiency of UNION in bridging vision and language across diverse query types.

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Hoang-Bao Le, Allie Tran, Binh T. Nguyen, Liting Zhou, Cathal Gurrin. 2025-11-27. UNION: A Lightweight Target Representation for Efficient Zero-Shot Image-Guided Retrieval with Optional Textual Queries. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22253

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