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arXiv · 2602.08411

A Sketch+Text Composed Image Retrieval Dataset for Thangka

Jinyu Xu·Yi Sun·Jiangling Zhang·Qing Xie·Daomin Ji·Zhifeng Bao·Jiachen Li·Yanchun Ma·Yongjian Liu
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Abstract

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables image retrieval by combining multiple query modalities, but existing benchmarks predominantly focus on general-domain imagery and rely on reference images with short textual modifications. As a result, they provide limited support for retrieval scenarios that require fine-grained semantic reasoning, structured visual understanding, and domain-specific knowledge. In this work, we introduce CIRThan, a sketch+text Composed Image Retrieval dataset for Thangka imagery, a culturally grounded and knowledge-specific visual domain characterized by complex structures, dense symbolic elements, and domain-dependent semantic conventions. CIRThan contains 2,287 high-quality Thangka images, each paired with a human-drawn sketch and hierarchical textual descriptions at three semantic levels, enabling composed queries that jointly express structural intent and multi-level semantic specification. We provide standardized data splits, comprehensive dataset analysis, and benchmark evaluations of representative supervised and zero-shot CIR methods. Experimental results reveal that existing CIR approaches, largely developed for general-domain imagery, struggle to effectively align sketch-based abstractions and hierarchical textual semantics with fine-grained Thangka images, particularly without in-domain supervision. We believe CIRThan offers a valuable benchmark for advancing sketch+text CIR, hierarchical semantic modeling, and multimodal retrieval in cultural heritage and other knowledge-specific visual domains. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/jinyuxu-whut/CIRThan.

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Jinyu Xu, Yi Sun, Jiangling Zhang, Qing Xie, Daomin Ji, Zhifeng Bao, Jiachen Li, Yanchun Ma, Yongjian Liu. 2026-02-09. A Sketch+Text Composed Image Retrieval Dataset for Thangka. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08411

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