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.
Recent work has shown that "Vision-Free'' approaches (representing images as text) can be effective for standard image retrieval tasks. However, it remains unclear whether this paradigm can effectively handle a more complex, multimodal task, Composed Image Retrieval (CIR), due to the inherent information loss in textual descriptions. In this paper, we introduce a Vision-Free CIR framework that addresses this challenge through two key techniques: (1) Attribute-Augmented Hybrid Scoring, which compensates for lost visual details via explicit attribute matching, and (2) LLM-Based Reranking, which verifies semantic consistency of top candidates. Experiments on the open-domain CIRR dataset show that our approach outperforms existing Zero-shot CIR methods (44.04% R@1, +8.79%). On FashionIQ, our results highlight the trade-off between semantic reasoning and fine-grained visual matching. Ablation studies reveal that both attribute-augmented scoring and LLM-Based Reranking consistently improve performance.
Composed image retrieval requires identifying a target image from a gallery by integrating a reference image with a textual modification instruction. In a training-free zero-shot setting, this task relies on constructing a retrieval-oriented textual query within a frozen vision--language embedding space at inference time. Existing approaches predominantly rely on a single-pass generation strategy that fuses the reference context and modification text into a unified description. This strategy makes it difficult to detect or correct semantic distortions and omissions during generation. Consequently, the preservation of reference attributes and the integration of textual requirements interfere with each other, which degrades retrieval precision. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-CIR, a training-free framework that structures query construction as a multi-stage reasoning pipeline. The framework operates through a Planner--Executor--Critic architecture where the Planner extracts explicit constraints, the Executor generates multiple candidate target descriptions, and the Critic evaluates these candidates based on constraint compliance. By reframing query construction as a staged inference process instead of a single-pass output, PEC-CIR reduces the propagation of generative errors by explicitly evaluating candidate queries before retrieval, thereby improving retrieval stability.
The CoVR-R challenge evaluates composed video retrieval, where a system must retrieve a target video from a large gallery given a reference video and a textual edit instruction. This setting is not a standard video-text retrieval problem: the query is defined by both the visual evidence in the source video and the transformation implied by the edit. A strong embedding model can provide scalable candidate recall, but it may under-express target-side consequences such as state changes, action replacement, object preservation, or temporal consistency. A pairwise multimodal reranker can verify such details more directly, but exhaustive reranking over the full gallery is computationally infeasible. We present R3, a zero-shot composed video retrieval pipeline built around Reasoning-guided Recalling and Reranking. The core idea is to turn the source-edit query into a reasoning-grounded retrieval program rather than treating the edit text as a short caption. First, the model generates a reasoning trace that describes the expected target video after applying the edit. Then the trace is encoded together with the source video as a reasoning-augmented query, and its retrieval score is fused with the base composed query through an agreement-gated residual rule. At last, a re-ranker verifies the recalled candidates with direct source-candidate comparison. Experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in addressing this challenge. Codes are available on https://github.com/Lee-zixu/R-3.