Organizations: Yanshan University Qinhuangdao, China · Central South University Changsha, China · Zhejiang University Hangzhou, China · Southwest University Chongqing, China · Singapore Management University Singapore · Singapore University of Technology and Design Singapore
Fashion understanding requires both visual perception and expert-level reasoning about style, occasion, compatibility, and outfit rationale. However, existing fashion datasets remain fragmented and task-specific, often focusing on item attributes, outfit co-occurrence, or weak textual supervision, and thus provide limited support for holistic outfit understanding. In this paper, we introduce FashionStylist, an expert-annotated benchmark for holistic and expert-level fashion understanding. Constructed through a dedicated fashion-expert annotation pipeline, FashionStylist provides professionally grounded annotations at both the item and outfit levels. It supports three representative tasks: outfit-to-item grounding, outfit completion, and outfit evaluation. These tasks cover realistic item recovery from complex outfits with layering and accessories, compatibility-aware composition beyond co-occurrence matching, and expert-level assessment of style, season, occasion, and overall coherence. Experimental results show that FashionStylist serves not only as a unified benchmark for multiple fashion tasks, but also as an effective training resource for improving grounding, completion, and outfit-level semantic evaluation in MLLM-based fashion systems.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Overview of our proposed FashionStylist, where the green part presents the pipeline of dataset construction, the purple part provides toy data examples in FashionStylist, and the blue part introduces the proposed benchmark tasks.
Figure 2. ( Left ) Number of unique attribute values in FashionStylist across item- and outfit-level annotations. ( Right ) Normalized co-occurrence frequency between the top-5 most common colors and outfit styles.
Model
Mode
R@10 ( ↑ )
N@10 ( ↑ )
PSNR ( ↑ )
SSIM ( ↑ )
FID ( ↓ )
KID ( ↓ )
Flux.1- Kontext
Default
0.0765
0.0456
11.574
0.7255
77.879
0.0120
Sft
0.0890
0.0575
12.175
0.7351
71.709
0.0126
Improv.
+16.3%
+26.1%
+5.2%
+1.3%
+7.9%
-5.0%
Qwen- ImageEdit
Default
0.1812
0.1138
10.544
0.6720
63.598
0.0104
Sft
0.2254
0.1406
11.677
0.6782
45.505
0.0042
Improv.
+24.4%
+23.6%
+10.7%
+0.9%
+28.4%
+59.6%
Table 2. Performance comparison on Task #1, where ↑ ( ↓ ) denotes higher (lower) is better, Improv. denotes the relative improvement of Sft over Default , bold indicates the best within each model, and indicates the best across all models.
Figure 3. Performance comparison across two representative item categories. We report 100/FID so that higher values consistently indicate better performance across all metrics.
Type
Model
Mode
R@10 ( ↑ )
R@20 ( ↑ )
N@10 ( ↑ )
N@20 ( ↑ )
Retrieval
POG
Default
0.0022
0.0065
0.0007
0.0018
Eke.
0.0054
0.0131
0.0028
0.0047
Improv.
+145.5%
+101.5%
+300.0%
+161.1%
CIRP
Default
0.0239
0.0423
0.0131
0.0175
Eke.
0.0293
0.0456
0.0173
0.0213
Improv.
+22.6%
+7.8%
+32.1%
+21.7%
Table 3. Performance comparison on Task #2, where Eke. denotes “Expert knowledge-enhanced”, Improv. denotes the relative improvement of Eke. over Default .
Model
Mode
Style ( ↑ )
Season ( ↑ )
Occasion ( ↑ )
Mod. ( ↑ )
Gemma3-4b
Instruct
0.1325
0.1950
0.2725
0.0100
Think
0.1425
0.2575
0.2425
0.1200
Sft
0.2500
0.4425
0.2875
0.0850
Improv.
+88.7%
+126.9%
+5.5%
+750.0%
Qwen3VL-4b
Instruct
0.1975
0.3250
0.2525
0.1150
Think
0.2125
0.3625
0.2250
0.1000
Table 4. Performance comparison on Task #3, where Improv. indicates the relative gain of Sft over Instruct .
Fashion intelligence spans multiple tasks, i.e., retrieval, recommendation, recognition, and dialogue, yet remains hindered by fragmented supervision and incomplete fashion annotations. These limitations jointly restrict the formation of consistent visual-semantic structures, preventing recent vision-language models (VLMs) from serving as a generalist fashion brain that unifies understanding and reasoning across tasks. Therefore, we construct FashionX, a million-scale dataset that exhaustively annotates visible fashion items within an outfit and organizes attributes from global to part-level. Built upon this foundation, we propose OmniFashion, a unified vision-language framework that bridges diverse fashion tasks under a unified fashion dialogue paradigm, enabling both multi-task reasoning and interactive dialogue. Experiments on multi-subtasks and retrieval benchmarks show that OmniFashion achieves strong task-level accuracy and cross-task generalization, highlighting its offering of a scalable path toward universal, dialogue-oriented fashion intelligence.
Zhengwei Yang, Andi Long, Hao Li +3
National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University · Harbin Institute of Technology
Fashion complementary image generation (CIG) aims to create garments that stylistically match a seed item based on user intent, making it a natural multimodal grounding problem where models must interpret language in visual context. Existing CIG benchmarks rely on rigid template prompts (e.g., "a photo of a skirt"), failing to reflect natural user queries and obscuring model behavior across levels of linguistic specificity. We introduce fashion complementary image generation with free-form instructions, a multimodal language-grounding setting where a model generates a compatible garment from a seed image and a natural-language instruction. To this end, we enrich three CIG benchmarks with low-, medium-, and high-specificity instructions generated by a vision-language model and validated by human annotators. We instantiate the task with StyleFlow, a Rectified Flow Matching model that jointly conditions on the seed image and instruction within a single multimodal transformer. Across image quality metrics, catalog-alignment analysis, ablations, and human evaluation, StyleFlow consistently produces instruction-aligned and stylistically coherent garments while reducing architectural complexity and inference cost relative to auxiliary-module approaches.
Matteo Attimonelli, Claudio Pomo, Alessandro De Bellis +3
Politecnico di Bari, Italy · Sapienza University of Rome, Italy · University of Klagenfurt, Austria
We present Loom, an outfit recommendation system that combines neural embedding retrieval with structured domain scoring to generate complete, coherent outfits from fashion catalogs. Given an anchor clothing item, Loom retrieves complementary pieces via slot-constrained approximate nearest neighbor search over FashionCLIP embeddings, then scores candidate outfits using a multi-objective function that integrates six signals: embedding similarity, color harmony, formality consistency, occasion coherence, style direction, and within-outfit diversity. We introduce two techniques that address limitations of purely learned or purely rule-based approaches: (1) semantic material weight, which uses CLIP embedding geometry to infer garment heaviness for layer compatibility without hand-coded material taxonomies; and (2) vibe/anti-vibe occasion priors, which embed prose descriptions of occasion contexts as anchor vectors in CLIP space and score items by differential affinity. Ablation experiments on a catalog of 620 items show that each component contributes measurably to outfit quality: the full system achieves a mean outfit score of 0.179 with a 9.3% hard violation rate, compared to 0.054 score and 16.0% violations for a category-constrained random baseline, a 3.3x improvement in score and 42% reduction in violations. Direction reranking is the single indispensable component: removing it drops score to 0.052, essentially equal to random. The system generates three stylistically distinct outfits in under 5 seconds on commodity hardware.