PDV: Prompt Directional Vectors for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval


Creative Commons License

Tursun O., KALKAN S., Denman S., Fookes C.

2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2026, Arizona, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, 6 - 10 Mart 2026, ss.7740-7749, (Tam Metin Bildiri) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1109/wacv61042.2026.00747
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Arizona
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Amerika Birleşik Devletleri
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.7740-7749
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: composed image retrieval, image retrieval, prompt, vlm, zero-shot, zs-cir
  • Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) enables image search using a reference image and a text prompt without requiring specialized text-image composition networks trained on large-scale paired data. However, current ZS-CIR approaches suffer from three critical limitations in their reliance on composed text embeddings: static query embedding representations, insufficient utilization of image embeddings, and suboptimal performance when fusing text and image embeddings. To address these challenges, we introduce the Prompt Directional Vector (PDV), a simple yet effective training-free enhancement that captures semantic modifications induced by user prompts. PDV enables three key improvements: (1) Dynamic composed text embeddings where prompt adjustments are controllable via a scaling factor, (2) composed image embeddings through semantic transfer from text prompts to image features, and (3) weighted fusion of composed text and image embeddings that enhances retrieval by balancing visual and semantic similarity. Our approach serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for existing ZS-CIR methods with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PDV consistently improves retrieval performance when integrated with state-of-the-art ZS-CIR approaches, particularly for methods that generate accurate compositional embeddings. The code will be released upon publication.