Organizations: Walmart Global Tech Sunnyvale, California, USA
Abstract
Fashion retrieval often requires satisfying multiple attributes at once, such as category, color, pattern, and demographic. Monolithic embeddings mix these signals into a single vector, making attribute-specific control difficult at retrieval time. Many existing semantic-ID methods provide discrete item codes, but these codes are typically optimized as item-level or residual addresses and do not expose named, independently controllable attribute slots. We introduce MM-slotgate, a multimodal slot encoder that factorizes Fashion-CLIP text and image embeddings into four named attribute slots. Each slot learns its own text-image gate, so visually grounded attributes such as color and pattern can rely more on image evidence, while taxonomy-oriented attributes such as category and demographic can remain more text-driven. On H&M, using a combined slot-similarity and slot-logit retrieval score, MM-slotgate achieves 0.7566 macro ConstraintSatisfied@10, outperforming equal-weight multimodal fusion (0.7142) and fCLIP text-only retrieval (0.4755). The largest gain is on color, which improves from 0.321 to 0.889 (+0.568 absolute), as the learned color gate assigns 57.4% weight to image evidence. The learned gates are interpretable without modality supervision: color is image-leaning, category is text-leaning, and pattern and demographic lie near the middle. The resulting slots also remain controllable: linear probes show no measured excess leakage beyond the label-correlation baseline, and quantized slot codes support targeted intervention, including a 15.3x lift for color. These results suggest that controllable fashion retrieval benefits from typed, attribute-conditioned multimodal slots rather than either a single global embedding or opaque item-level semantic IDs.
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.
Real-world fashion search involves interactive retrieval across multiple turns. However, existing multi-turn retrieval methods are built on a restrictive assumption that every interaction follows the same attribute-editing paradigm, leaving heterogeneous intent transitions unexplored. Moreover, existing approaches often rely on textification to bridge multimodal queries and visual retrieval, which may lose fine-grained visual cues. To address these gaps, we introduce DIM-Fashion, a benchmark of 26K multi-turn sessions constructed from 13 fashion retrieval datasets across 7 tasks, featuring diverse intent transitions and rollback behaviors. We further propose FashionAM, an MLLM-VLP framework that directly aligns multimodal conversational queries with a fashion-oriented gallery embedding space, avoiding intermediate textification. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FashionAM over existing approaches. The dataset and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
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.