In satellite applications, user queries often take the form of open-ended natural language, extending beyond a fixed set of predefined categories. This open-vocabulary nature poses significant challenges for retrieving relevant image tiles, as the retrieval system must generalize to a wide range of unseen objects and concepts. While vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP are widely used for text-image retrieval, even fine-tuned variants often struggle to accurately align such queries with satellite imagery. To address this, we propose Open-SAT, a training-free query embedding refinement algorithm that operates at inference time to improve alignment between user queries and satellite image content. Open-SAT uses VLMs to compute embeddings for image tiles, which are stored in a vector database for efficient retrieval. At query time, it leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to refine the text embeddings by incorporating contextual information about objects of interest and their surroundings. A threshold-free retrieval mechanism further enhances accuracy and efficiency. Experimental results in three public benchmarks demonstrate that Open-SAT improves the F1 score by up to 16.04%, while retrieving a comparable number of image tiles. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Open-SAT in open-vocabulary satellite image retrieval, leveraging LLM guidance without the need for additional training or supervision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05344
Access to diverse, well-annotated medical images with interactive learning tools is fundamental for training practitioners in medicine and related fields to improve their diagnostic skills and understanding of anatomical structures. While medical atlases are valuable, they are often impractical due to their size and lack of interactivity, whereas online image search may provide mislabeled or incomplete material. To address this, we propose MIRAGE, a multimodal medical text and image retrieval and generation system that allows users to find and generate clinically relevant images from trustworthy sources by mapping both text and images to a shared latent space, enabling semantically meaningful queries. The system is based on a fine-tuned medical version of CLIP (MedICaT-ROCO), trained with the ROCO dataset, obtained from PubMed Central. MIRAGE allows users to give prompts to retrieve images, generate synthetic ones through a medical diffusion model (Prompt2MedImage) and receive enriched descriptions from a large language model (Dolly-v2-3b). It also supports a dual search option, enabling the visual comparison of different medical conditions. A key advantage of the system is that it relies entirely on publicly available pretrained models, ensuring reproducibility and accessibility. Our goal is to provide a free, transparent and easy-to-use didactic tool for medical students, especially those without programming skills. The system features an interface that enables interactive and personalized visual learning through medical image retrieval and generation. The system is accessible to medical students worldwide without requiring local computational resources or technical expertise, and is currently deployed on Kaggle: this http URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04772
EEG-based visual neural decoding aims to align neural responses with visual stimuli for tasks such as image retrieval. However, limited paired data and a fundamental mismatch between high-fidelity digital images and biological visual perception - distorted by retinotopic mapping and subject-specific neuroanatomy - severely impede cross-modal alignment. To address this, we propose MB2L, a Multi-Level Bidirectional Biomimetic Learning framework that incorporates structured physiological inductive biases into representation learning. Specifically, we propose Adaptive Blur with Visual Priors to mitigate perceptual-structural mismatch by reweighting visual inputs according to retinotopic priors. We further propose Biomimetic Visual Feature Extraction to learn multi-level visual representations consistent with hierarchical cortical processing, enhancing subject-invariant encoding. These modules are jointly optimized via Multi-level Bidirectional Contrastive Learning, which aligns EEG and visual features in a shared semantic space through bidirectional contrastive objectives. Experiments show MB2L achieves 80.5% Top-1 and 97.6% Top-5 accuracy on zero-shot EEG-to-image retrieval, significantly outperforming prior methods and demonstrating strong generalization across subjects and experimental settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04680
Personalized image completion aims to restore occluded regions in personal photos while preserving identity and appearance. Existing methods either rely on generic inpainting models that often fail to maintain identity consistency, or assume that suitable reference images are explicitly provided. In practice, suitable references are often not explicitly provided, requiring the system to search for identity-consistent images within personal photo collections. We present AlbumFill, a training-free framework that retrieves identity-consistent references from personal albums for personalized completion. Given an occluded image and a personal album, a vision-language model infers missing semantic cues to guide composed image retrieval, and the retrieved references are used by reference-based completion models. To facilitate this task, we introduce a dataset containing 54K human-centric samples with associated album images. Experiments across multiple baselines demonstrate the difficulty of personalized completion and highlight the importance of identity-consistent reference retrieval. Project Page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02892
Existing cross-subject fMRI decoding methods typically train a model on multiple scanned subjects and then adapt it to a new subject using substantial paired fMRI-image data. However, in realistic scenarios, new-subject fMRI data are often limited due to costly data acquisition, and raw data from previous subjects may be inaccessible, leading existing methods to suffer performance degradation during new-subject adaptation. In this paper, we identify that this degradation stems from two key issues: brain-side instability caused by large subject differences in fMRI responses, and image-side supervision unreliability caused by fine-grained visual details that are not reliably supported by limited fMRI signals. To address these challenges, we propose StableMind, a regularized adaptation framework designed to improve brain-side representation stability and image-side supervision reliability. (1) To stabilize brain representations, StableMind reuses ridge projections from the pretrained model as adaptation priors to constrain limited-data new-subject adaptation, and applies Fourier-based feature-level brain augmentation to improve robustness to individual variability. (2) To improve image supervision reliability, StableMind introduces difficulty-aware image blur for brain-image alignment, reducing the influence of fine-grained visual details that are weakly supported by limited fMRI signals while preserving stable visual structure. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset under a unified 1-hour adaptation protocol demonstrate that StableMind achieves 84.02% image retrieval accuracy and 81.66% brain retrieval accuracy averaged over four subjects, surpassing the state-of-the-art method by 5.71% brain retrieval accuracy with fewer trainable adaptation parameters. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02586
Vision foundation models have attracted significant attention for their ability to leverage large-scale unlabeled visual data. This advantage is particularly important in remote sensing, where data acquisition is costly and annotation often requires expert knowledge. Recent electro-optical vision foundation models aim to learn domain-specific representations from remote sensing imagery, but it remains unclear whether they are more effective than strong generalist vision foundation models under retrieval-based evaluation. In this study, we conduct a controlled comparison between representative EO-specific and generalist vision foundation models for remote sensing image retrieval. Using the same datasets, retrieval protocol, and evaluation metric, we evaluate both in-domain performance and cross-scene generalization. Our results show that strong generalist vision foundation models are competitive with, and in some cases outperform, existing EO-specific models. Moreover, EO-specific models often suffer from substantial degradation under cross-scene evaluation, while generalist models show more stable transfer. These findings suggest that EO pretraining alone does not guarantee stronger retrieval-oriented remote sensing representations. We discuss the limitations of current EO-specific pretraining strategies and highlight the need for future EO vision foundation models to better exploit the physical, spatial, spectral, and geographic characteristics of remote sensing imagery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02283
Recent EEG-to-image retrieval methods leverage pretrained vision encoders and foveation-inspired priors, but typically assume a fixed, center-focused view. This center bias conflicts with content-driven human attention, creating a geometric-semantic dissociation between visual features and EEG responses. We propose SIMON, a saliency-aware multi-view framework for zero-shot EEG-to-image retrieval. SIMON combines foreground segmentation and saliency prediction to select fixation centers via Saliency-Aware Sampling (SAS), then generates foveated views that emphasize informative object regions while suppressing background clutter. On THINGS-EEG, SIMON achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intra-subject and inter-subject settings, reaching an average Top-1 accuracy of 69.7% and 19.6%, respectively, consistently outperforming recent competitive baselines. Analyses across sampling granularity, EEG channel topology, and visual/brain encoder backbones further support the robustness of saliency-aware multi-view integration. Our code and models are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00401
Despite the rapid progress in data-driven 3D vision, aerial geometric 3D vision remains a formidable challenge due to the severe scarcity of large-scale, high-fidelity training data. Existing benchmarks, predominantly biased toward ground-level or object-centric views, do not account for complex viewpoint transformations and diverse environmental conditions in UAV-based sensing. To bridge this critical gap, we propose AirZoo, a unified large-scale dataset and benchmark for grounding aerial geometric 3D vision. AirZoo possesses three appealing properties: 1) Scalable Generation Pipeline: Leveraging freely available, world-scale photogrammetric 3D meshes, it renders vast outdoor environments with customizable UAV flight trajectories and configurable weather/illumination. 2) Comprehensive Scene Diversity: It provides the most extensive coverage of region types to date (spanning 378 regions across 22 countries), systematically encompassing both highly structured urban landscapes and complex unstructured natural environments. 3) Rich Geometric Annotations: Each frame provides synchronized, pixel-level metric depth and precise 6-DoF geo-referenced poses, essential for geometry-aware learning. Through three rigorous evaluation tracks -- aerial image retrieval, cross-view matching, and multi-view 3D reconstruction -- we demonstrate that AirZoo serves as a powerful pre-training engine. Extensive experiments on both public and newly collected real-world benchmarks reveal that fine-tuning on AirZoo yields substantial performance gains for SoTA models (e.g., MegaLoc, RoMa, VGGT, and Depth Anything 3), establishing a new performance upper bound for aerial spatial intelligence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26567
Aerial-Ground Re-Identification (AG-ReID) is constrained by the viewpoint-domain gap, as drastic viewpoint disparities occlude or distort discriminative features, making cross-viewpoint image retrieval challenging. While existing methods rely on paired cross-view annotations, real-world deployments, such as wilderness search-and-rescue (SAR), often lack target-domain data, requiring retrieval from ground-level references alone. To our knowledge, we are the first to address this challenge by formalizing the Single-View AG-ReID (SV AG-ReID) setting, where models trained on a single real viewpoint must generalize to an unseen viewpoint. We propose 3D Lifting-based Elevated Novel-view Synthesis (3D-LENS), a unified framework combining geometrically-consistent novel view synthesis that leverages large-scale 3D mesh reconstruction, with a robust representation learning scheme to mitigate synthetic-to-real bias. Unlike 2D generative baselines that suffer from geometric inconsistencies or prior 3D methods that are restricted to class-specific templates, our approach ensures view-consistent synthesis across diverse categories without predefined templates that fail to capture fine-grained details, such as carried objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on SV AG-ReID scenarios. Code and data will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26520
Foundation models are reshaping computational histopathology, yet their value for whole-slide image retrieval relative to strong patch-based and supervised aggregation baselines remains unclear. We benchmarked ten pipelines on 9,387 diagnostic slides spanning 17 organs and 60 diagnoses from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) using patient-level leave-one-patient-out evaluation. Methods included four pre-trained slide foundation models, a supervised attention-based multiple instance learning (ABMIL) aggregator on patch embeddings, and patch-level retrieval across five sampling densities. Performance varied more across organs and diagnoses than across architectures. Although the slide foundation model TITAN achieved the strongest overall results, its advantage was modest; ABMIL and patch-based methods reached comparable Top-1 and Top-3 accuracy, with no model consistently dominant. Morphologically distinctive entities approached ceiling performance, while rare, heterogeneous, and closely related subtypes remained challenging. Misclassifications aligned with organs exhibiting known inter-observer variability, suggesting an intrinsic ceiling for morphology-only retrieval. Performance was driven primarily by patch-level feature representations, with limited benefit from slide-level aggregation, indicating aggregation may be unnecessary in many settings. These findings argue against a universally optimal architecture and instead support organ-resolved benchmarking, diagnosis-aware or ensemble strategies, stronger feature representations, and multimodal retrieval frameworks. Notably, even the best model achieved only $\approx 68\% \pm 21\%$ retrieval accuracy on TCGA, and some subtypes showed $0\%$ accuracy across all methods, highlighting fundamental limitations of morphology-based representations and the need for substantial progress before reliable clinical deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00902
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems enable users to search images based on visual content instead of relying on metadata. The text domain has benefited from vector search of representations created with unsupervised methods such as BERT. However, modern self-supervised learning methods for vision are mostly not reported in CBIR-related literature, instead relying on supervised models or multi-modal methods that align text and vision. We evaluate how the representations learned by modern self-supervised learning methods for vision perform under typical retrieval stacks that leverage vector databases and nearest neighbor search. Our evaluation reveals that the latent space geometry impacts approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) indexing. Specifically, highly anisotropic representations with high skewness produced by several modern SSL methods degrade the performance of partition-based and hashing-based search, even if their own linear probe or K-NN accuracy is not affected. In contrast, representations with higher isotropy and local purity better satisfy the distance-based assumptions of ANN indexes, leading to improved semantic retrieval performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24469
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an important image retrieval paradigm that enables users to retrieve a target image using a multimodal query that consists of a reference image and modification text. Although research on CIR has made significant progress, prevailing setups still rely simple modification texts that typically cover only a limited range of salient changes, which induces two limitations highly relevant to practical applications, namely Insufficient Entity Coverage and Clause-Entity Misalignment. In order to address these issues and bring CIR closer to real-world use, we construct two instruction-rich multi-modification datasets, M-FashionIQ and M-CIRR. In addition, we propose TEMA, the Text-oriented Entity Mapping Architecture, which is the first CIR framework designed for multi-modification while also accommodating simple modifications. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that TEMA's superiority in both original and multi-modification scenarios, while maintaining an optimal balance between retrieval accuracy and computational efficiency. Our codes and constructed multi-modification dataset (M-FashionIQ and M-CIRR) are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21806
The Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task provides a flexible retrieval paradigm via a reference image and modification text, but it heavily relies on expensive and error-prone triplet annotations. This paper systematically investigates the Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) problem introduced by annotations. We find that NTC noise, particularly ``hard noise'' (i.e., the reference and target images are highly similar but the modification text is incorrect), poses a unique challenge to existing Noise Correspondence Learning (NCL) methods because it breaks the traditional ``small loss hypothesis''. We identify and elucidate three key, yet overlooked, challenges in the NTC task, namely (C1) Modality Suppression, (C2) Negative Anchor Deficiency, and (C3) Unlearning Backlash. To address these challenges, we propose a Cone-based robuSt noisE-unlearning comPositional network (ConeSep). Specifically, we first propose Geometric Fidelity Quantization, theoretically establishing and practically estimating a noise boundary to precisely locate noisy correspondence. Next, we introduce Negative Boundary Learning, which learns a ``diagonal negative combination'' for each query as its explicit semantic opposite-anchor in the embedding space. Finally, we design Boundary-based Targeted Unlearning, which models the noisy correction process as an optimal transport problem, elegantly avoiding Unlearning Backlash. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (FashionIQ and CIRR) demonstrate that ConeSep significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, which fully demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20358
Composed image retrieval, multi-turn composed image retrieval, and composed video retrieval all share a common paradigm: composing the reference visual with modification text to retrieve the desired target. Despite this shared structure, the three tasks have been studied in isolation, with no prior work proposing a unified framework, let alone a zero-shot solution. In this paper, we propose UniCVR, the first unified zero-shot composed visual retrieval framework that jointly addresses all three tasks without any task-specific human-annotated data. UniCVR strategically combines two complementary strengths: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for compositional query understanding and Vision-Language Pre-trained (VLP) models for structured visual retrieval. Concretely, UniCVR operates in two stages. In Stage I, we train the MLLM as a compositional query embedder via contrastive learning on a curated multi-source dataset of approximately 3.5M samples, bridging the heterogeneous embedding spaces between the MLLM and the frozen VLP gallery encoder. A cluster-based hard negative sampling strategy is proposed to strengthen contrastive supervision. In Stage II, we introduce an MLLM-guided dual-level reranking mechanism that applies adaptive budgeted subset scoring to a small number of top-ranked candidates, and then exploits the resulting relevance signals through a dual-level re-scoring scheme, producing more accurate final rankings with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks covering all three tasks demonstrate that UniCVR achieves cutting-edge performance, validating its effectiveness and generalizability. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20318
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) has attracted significant attention due to its flexible multimodal query method, yet its development is severely constrained by the Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) problem. Most existing robust learning methods rely on the "small loss hypothesis", but the unique semantic ambiguity in NTC, such as "partial matching", invalidates this assumption, leading to unreliable noise identification. This entraps the model in a self dependent vicious cycle where the learner is intertwined with the arbiter, ultimately causing catastrophic "representation pollution". To address this critical challenge, we propose a novel "Expert-Proxy-Diversion" decoupling paradigm, named Air-Know (ArbIteR calibrated Knowledge iNternalizing rObust netWork). Air-Know incorporates three core modules: (1) External Prior Arbitration (EPA), which utilizes Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as an offline expert to construct a high precision anchor dataset; (2) Expert Knowledge Internalization (EKI), which efficiently guides a lightweight proxy "arbiter" to internalize the expert's discriminative logic; (3) Dual Stream Reconciliation (DSR), which leverages the EKI's matching confidence to divert the training data, achieving a clean alignment stream and a representation feedback reconciliation stream. Extensive experiments on multiple CIR benchmark datasets demonstrate that Air-Know significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods under the NTC setting, while also showing strong competitiveness in traditional CIR.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19386
Despite recent progress, vision-language encoders struggle with two core limitations: (1) weak alignment between language and dense vision features, which hurts tasks like open-vocabulary semantic segmentation; and (2) high token counts for fine-grained visual representations, which limits scalability to long videos. This work addresses both limitations. We propose T-REN (Text-aligned Region Encoder Network), an efficient encoder that maps visual data to a compact set of text-aligned region-level representations (or region tokens). T-REN achieves this through a lightweight network added on top of a frozen vision backbone, trained to pool patch-level representations within each semantic region into region tokens and align them with region-level text annotations. With only 3.7% additional parameters compared to the vision-language backbone, this design yields substantially stronger dense cross-modal understanding while reducing the token count by orders of magnitude. Specifically, T-REN delivers +5.9 mIoU on ADE20K open-vocabulary segmentation, +18.4% recall on COCO object-level text-image retrieval, +15.6% recall on Ego4D video object localization, and +17.6% mIoU on VSPW video scene parsing, all while reducing token counts by more than 24x for images and 187x for videos compared to the patch-based vision-language backbone. The code and model are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18573
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging image retrieval paradigm that enables to retrieve target images based on multimodal queries consisting of reference images and modification texts. Although substantial progress has been made in recent years, existing methods assume that all samples are correctly matched. However, in real-world scenarios, due to high triplet annotation costs, CIR datasets inevitably contain annotation errors, resulting in incorrectly matched triplets. To address this issue, the problem of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) has attracted growing attention. We argue that noise in CIR can be categorized into two types: cross-modal correspondence noise and modality-inherent noise. The former arises from mismatches across modalities, whereas the latter originates from intra-modal background interference or visual factors irrelevant to the coarse-grained modification annotations. However, modality-inherent noise is often overlooked, and research on cross-modal correspondence noise remains nascent. To tackle above issues, we propose the Invariance and discrimiNaTion-awarE Noise neTwork (INTENT), comprising two components: Visual Invariant Composition and Bi-Objective Discriminative Learning, specifically designed to handle the two-aspect noise. The former applies causal intervention on the visual side via Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to generate intervened composed features, enforcing visual invariance and enabling the model to ignore modality-inherent noise during composition. The latter adopts collaborative optimization with both positive and negative samples, and constructs a scalable decision boundary that dynamically adjusts decisions based on the loyalty degree, enabling robust correspondence discrimination. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and robustness of INTENT.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18051
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a flexible image retrieval paradigm that enables users to accurately locate the target image through a multimodal query composed of a reference image and modification text. Although this task has demonstrated promising applications in personalized search and recommendation systems, it encounters a severe challenge in practical scenarios known as the Noise Triplet Correspondence (NTC) problem. This issue primarily arises from the high cost and subjectivity involved in annotating triplet data. To address this problem, we identify two central challenges: the precise estimation of composed semantic discrepancy and the insufficient progressive adaptation to modification discrepancy. To tackle these challenges, we propose a cHrono-synergiA roBust progressIve learning framework for composed image reTrieval (HABIT), which consists of two core modules. First, the Mutual Knowledge Estimation Module quantifies sample cleanliness by calculating the Transition Rate of mutual information between the composed feature and the target image, thereby effectively identifying clean samples that align with the intended modification semantics. Second, the Dual-consistency Progressive Learning Module introduces a collaborative mechanism between the historical and current models, simulating human habit formation to retain good habits and calibrate bad habits, ultimately enabling robust learning under the presence of NTC. Extensive experiments conducted on two standard CIR datasets demonstrate that HABIT significantly outperforms most methods under various noise ratios, exhibiting superior robustness and retrieval performance. Codes are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18037
Visual decoding of neurophysiological signals is a critical challenge for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and computational neuroscience. However, current approaches are often constrained by the systematic and stochastic gaps between neural and visual modalities, largely neglecting the intrinsic computational mechanisms of the Human Visual System (HVS). To address this, we propose Brain-Inspired Capture (BI-Cap), a neuromimetic perceptual simulation paradigm that aligns these modalities by emulating HVS processing. Specifically, we construct a neuromimetic pipeline comprising four biologically plausible dynamic and static transformations, coupled with Mutual Information (MI)-guided dynamic blur regulation to simulate adaptive visual processing. Furthermore, to mitigate the inherent non-stationarity of neural activity, we introduce an evidence-driven latent space representation. This formulation explicitly models uncertainty, thereby ensuring robust neural embeddings. Extensive evaluations on zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval across two public benchmarks demonstrate that BI-Cap substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving relative gains of 9.2\% and 8.0\%, respectively. We have released the source code on GitHub through the link this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17927
With the rapid growth of video data, Composed Video Retrieval (CVR) has emerged as a novel paradigm in video retrieval and is receiving increasing attention from researchers. Unlike unimodal video retrieval methods, the CVR task takes a multi-modal query consisting of a reference video and a piece of modification text as input. The modification text conveys the user's intended alterations to the reference video. Based on this input, the model aims to retrieve the most relevant target video. In the CVR task, there exists a substantial discrepancy in information density between video and text modalities. Traditional composition methods tend to bias the composed feature toward the reference video, which leads to suboptimal retrieval performance. This limitation is significant due to the presence of three core challenges: (1) modal contribution entanglement, (2) explicit optimization of composed features, and (3) retrieval uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose the evidence-dRivRn dual-sTream diRectionAl anChor calibration networK (ReTrack). ReTrack is the first CVR framework that improves multi-modal query understanding by calibrating directional bias in composed features. It consists of three key modules: Semantic Contribution Disentanglement, Composition Geometry Calibration, and Reliable Evidence-driven Alignment. Specifically, ReTrack estimates the semantic contribution of each modality to calibrate the directional bias of the composed feature. It then uses the calibrated directional anchors to compute bidirectional evidence that drives reliable composed-to-target similarity estimation. Moreover, ReTrack exhibits strong generalization to the Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task, achieving SOTA performance across three benchmark datasets in both CVR and CIR scenarios. Codes are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17898