The progress of composed image retrieval (CIR), a popular research direction in image retrieval, where a combined visual and textual query is used, is held back by the absence of high-quality training and evaluation data. We introduce a new evaluation dataset, i-CIR, which, unlike existing datasets, focuses on an instancelevel class definition. The goal is to retrieve images that contain the same particular object as the visual query, presented under a variety of modifications defined by textual queries. Its design and curation process keep the dataset compact to facilitate future research, while maintaining its challenge--comparable to retrieval among more than 40M random distractors--through a semi-automated selection of hard negatives.

Given a pair of task-specific example images, such as depth from/to image and scribble from/to image, and a text guidance, our model automatically understands the underlying task and performs the same task on a new query image following the text guidance.

Additionally, the patch tokens in foundation models can enrich the features in the detector's encoder

The growing capacity of modern deep learning models made them prone to overfitting when trained on relatively small labeled datasets.

Efficiently searching for relevant case studies is critical in architectural design, as designers rely on precedent examples to guide or inspire their ongoing projects. However, traditional text-based search tools struggle to capture the inherently visual and complex nature of architectural knowledge, often leading to time-consuming and imprecise exploration. This paper introduces ArchSeek, an innovative case study search system with recommendation capability, tailored for architecture design professionals. Powered by the visual understanding capabilities from vision-language models and cross-modal embeddings, it enables text and image queries with fine-grained control, and interaction-based design case recommendations. It offers architects a more efficient, personalized way to discover design inspirations, with potential applications across other visually driven design fields. The source code is available at https://github.com/danruili/ArchSeek.

We investigate the internal representations of vision-and-language models (VLMs) and how they encode task representations. We consider tasks specified through examples or instructions, using either text or image inputs. Surprisingly, we find that conceptually similar tasks are mapped to similar task vector representations, regardless of how they are specified. Our findings suggest that to output answers, tokens in VLMs undergo three distinct phases: input, task, and answer, a process which is consistent across different modalities and specifications. The task vectors we identify in VLMs are general enough to be derived in one modality (e.g., text) and transferred to another (e.g., image). Additionally, we find that ensembling exemplar and instruction based task vectors produce better task representations. Taken together, these insights shed light on the underlying mechanisms of VLMs, particularly their ability to represent tasks in a shared manner across different modalities and task specifications. Project page: https://task-vectors-are-cross-modal.github.io.

Given an image query, visually prompted keyword localisation (VPKL) aims to find occurrences of the depicted word in a speech collection. This can be useful when transcriptions are not available for a low-resource language (e.g. if it is unwritten). Previous work showed that VPKL can be performed with a visually grounded speech model trained on paired images and unlabelled speech. But all experiments were done on English. Moreover, transcriptions were used to get positive and negative pairs for the contrastive loss. This paper introduces a few-shot learning scheme to mine pairs automatically without transcriptions. On English, this results in only a small drop in performance. We also - for the first time - consider VPKL on a real low-resource language, Yoruba. While scores are reasonable, here we see a bigger drop in performance compared to using ground truth pairs because the mining is less accurate in Yoruba.