Abstract
Adapting a foundation vision-language encoder to a specialized retrieval task creates a fundamental tradeoff: gains on the target distribution come at the cost of the foundation model's broad generalization, and fashion retrieval is a stringent instance of this problem. We present ZooClaw-FashionSigLIP2, a fashion-specialized SigLIP2-base model that resolves this tradeoff with a simple recipe -- full fine-tuning with knowledge distillation on curated in-domain data, followed by \wiseft~\citep{wortsman2022wiseft} weight interpolation with the base model -- and outperforms LoRA, larger backbones (up to 1B parameters), and external training data. Under fair evaluation, ZooClaw-FashionSigLIP2 outperforms all baselines on every benchmark in our suite. In addition, we release ZooClaw-Fashion, a new high-quality fashion retrieval benchmark, and a systematic quality analysis of widely-used benchmarks that exposes and mitigates structural biases in their public ground truth. We open-source the model weights and all evaluation artifacts to facilitate future research.
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Jun 18, 2026cs.CV
Composed image retrieval retrieves a target image using a composed query of a reference image and a modified text description. In the fashion domain, this task requires understanding subtle attribute variations such as color, pattern, and texture. However, existing approaches face limitations due to scarce annotated data and simplistic negative sampling. We propose a novel framework that integrates a multi-modal large language model (LLaVA) to generate attribute-aware triplets and introduces a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance contrastive learning. We leverage pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP-ViT/B32, to generate and concatenate sentence-level prompts with the relative caption and to scale the number of negatives using static representations. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced compositional reasoning and improved fine-grained retrieval behavior, underscoring the feasibility and potential of the proposed framework for fashion retrieval.
Nguyen Cao Hoang, Hoang Bui Le, Nam Vo Hoang +1
May 21, 2026cs.CV
Fashion image retrieval is a cornerstone of modern e-commerce systems. A unified framework that supports diverse query formats and search intentions is highly desired in practice. However, existing approaches focus on narrow retrieval tasks and do not fully capture such diversity. Therefore, in this work, we aim to develop a unified framework capable of handling diverse realistic fashion retrieval scenarios, achieving truly versatile fashion image retrieval. To establish a data foundation, we first introduce U-FIRE, a comprehensive benchmark that consolidates fragmented fashion datasets into a unified collection, supplemented by two manually curated datasets for testing generalization. Building upon this, we propose FashionLens, a unified framework based on Multimodal Large Language Models. To handle divergent matching objectives, we design a Proposal-Guided Spherical Query Calibrator that dynamically shifts query representations into task-aligned metric spaces via adaptive spherical linear interpolation. Additionally, to mitigate the optimization imbalance caused by varying task complexities and data scales, we develop a Gradient-Guided Adaptive Sampling strategy that automatically re-weights tasks based on realtime learning difficulty and the data scale prior. Experiments on U-FIRE show that FashionLens achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse retrieval scenarios and generalizes robustly to unseen tasks. The data and code are publicly released at https://github.com/haokunwen/FashionLens.
Haokun Wen, Xuemeng Song, Xinghao Xie +3
May 11, 2026cs.CV
We present Fashion Florence, a Florence-2 vision-language model fine-tuned with LoRA to extract structured fashion attributes from clothing images. Given a single photograph, the model generates a JSON object containing category, color, material, style tags, and occasion tags, structured output suitable for direct programmatic consumption by downstream recommendation and retrieval systems. Fine-tuning data is derived from the iMaterialist Fashion dataset (228 labels), where we collapse fine-grained annotations into a compact 6-category, 16-color, 19-style schema via rule-based label engineering. We apply LoRA (r=16, alpha=32) to all decoder linear layers, training for 3 epochs on 3,688 examples. On a held-out test set of 461 images, Fashion Florence achieves 94.6% category accuracy and 63.0% material accuracy, compared to 89.3% / 43.3% for GPT-4o-mini and 87.4% for Gemini 2.5 Flash. Fashion Florence produces valid JSON in 99.8% of outputs while running at 0.77B parameters on a single GPU at zero marginal inference cost. Style tag F1 reaches 0.753 vs. 0.612 (Gemini) and 0.398 (GPT-4o-mini). The model is deployed as a Hugging Face Space and integrated into Loom, an open-source outfit recommendation system.
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