Image Retrieval

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Overview

Image retrieval studies how to find relevant images in large collections using images, text, sketches, metadata, or combinations of these. Common approaches learn shared vision-language embeddings with contrastive training, then improve fine-grained matching with regions or patches, reranking, and compact hashes or indexes. Composed and conversational retrieval adds user-described changes or constraints, while applications range from products and people to medical images, geolocation, and scientific data. A central challenge is balancing broad, efficient retrieval with precise semantic and local matching, while benchmarks must distinguish genuine multimodal understanding from shortcuts or noisy relevance labels.

Latest papers

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85 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Rethinking Fisher Vectors for Second-order Multi-scale Deep Feature Aggregation in Scalable Scene Retrieval

    Oct 22, 2026Alexy Bhowmick, Sarat Saharia, Shyamanta M. HazarikaImage RetrievalMulti-Scale Feature Fusion

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Assam Don Bosco University, Azara, Guwahati 781017, Assam, India. · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Tezpur University, Tezpur 784028, Assam, India · Biomimetic Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati 781039, Assam, India

  2. Less is More: Concise Retrieval and Critic-based Re-ranking for Composed Image Retrieval

    Oct 20, 2026Yuqian Zheng, Hyoju Ahn, Hyeongjin Ahn +1Composed Image RetrievalImage Retrieval

    Department of Applied Artificial Intelligence, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Department of Immersive Media Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Jaume I University, Castellon, Spain

  3. CertEx: Exact Visual Retrieval at Scale by Certified Exclusion

    Oct 15, 2026Dongfang ZhaoExact Nearest Neighbor Searchk-Nearest Neighbors

    Tacoma School of Engineering & Technology and eScience Institute, University of Washington

  4. Web Scale on a Budget: Tail-Aware Retrieval Evaluation

    Oct 13, 2026Boaz Meivar, Shai AvidanIR EvaluationInformation Retrieval

    Tel Aviv University

  5. Beyond Resolution: Object-to-Image Ratio Mismatch in Instance Retrieval

    Oct 8, 2026Boaz Meivar, Ofir Kedem, Amit Edenzon +2Image RetrievalRetrieval Robustness

    Tel Aviv University · Bar-Ilan University

  6. Region-Aware CLS Token Augmentation for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval

    Oct 7, 2026Ian de Holanda Cavalcanti Bezerra, Vivek Trivedy, Lucas Pascotti Valem +1Fine-Grained Image RetrievalImage Retrieval

    Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science (ICMC), University of S˜ao Paulo (USP), S˜ao Carlos, Brazil · Department of Computer and Information Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

  7. NeuroCBIR: A Fast and Accurate Image Retrieval System for Whole-Brain and Region-Specific MRI

    Oct 5, 2026Felix Nieto-del-Amor, Jingru Fu, J. -Sebastian Muehlboeck +3Image RetrievalMedical Image Representation Learning

  8. Patch-based Querying Identifies Structures of Interest in Electron Microscopy

    Oct 5, 2026Niels Vyncke, Nicolas Nadisic, Yvan Saeys +1Image RetrievalMicroscopy Image Analysis

    Department of Telecommunications and Information Processing, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, Ghent, 9000, Belgium · Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), Jubelpark 1, Brussels, 1000, Belgium · Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics, Krijgslaan 281, Ghent, 9000, Belgium

  9. When Does Geometric View Synthesis Help Wine Label Retrieval? A Public One-Shot Benchmark Across Self-Supervised and Vision-Language Backbones

    Sep 27, 2026Yueh-Cheng HuangVLM AdaptationNovel View Synthesis

    Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien 974301, Taiwan

  10. MINER: Multi-crop INference-time Enhancement for Rare-Object Retrieval with Frozen Dual Encoders

    Sep 22, 2026Abdulmalik Alquwayfili, Faisal AlMeshal, Jumanah Almajnouni +2Vision-Language RetrievalImage Retrieval

    Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA)

  11. What Drives Hierarchy-Aware Image Retrieval? Taxonomy Alignment, Objective Choice, and Geometry

    Sep 22, 2026Ling ShiImage RetrievalHierarchical Representation Learning

    Southeast University

  12. Generative Retrieval for Unsupervised Text-Based Person Search

    Sep 11, 2026Mang Ye, Yucheng Ji, Yang Bai +4Text-Based Person SearchUnsupervised Learning

    School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, SuZhou, China · Zhipu AI, Beijing 100089, China +1

  13. Feature Recovery for Object Understanding After Irreversible Fire Damage

    Sep 10, 2026Aditi Tiwari, Sofia Stoica, Savya Khosla +2Object DetectionImage Retrieval

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL 61801

  14. POI-Loc: A Fine-Grained POI Localization Benchmark and an Asymmetric Global-to-Local Matching Method

    Sep 2, 2026Lu Han, Xiting Sun, Hao Wang +4Image MatchingVisual Place Recognition

    Amap, Alibaba Group, Beijing, China

  15. Aggregating Neighbor Embedding Projection and Rank-Based Manifold Learning for Image Retrieval

    Sep 2, 2026Vinicius Atsushi Sato Kawai, Gustavo Rosseto Leticio, Lucas Pascotti Valem +1Manifold LearningImage Retrieval

    Department of Statistics, Applied Mathematics, and Computing (DEMAC), São Paulo State University (UNESP), Av. 24 A, Rio Claro, SP, 13506-900, Brazil. · Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science (ICMC), University of São Paulo (USP), Av. Trabalhador São-carlense, 400 - Centro, São Carlos, SP, 13566-590, Brazil.

  16. AutoConcept: Training-Free Concept-Guided Reranking for Metadata-Available Composed Image Retrieval

    Sep 1, 2026Tianyu Wang, Tianjiao WuMultimodal RerankingImage Retrieval

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, China · INSTITUT NATIONAL DES SCIENCES APPLIQUEES DE LYON, Lyon, France

  17. FoundYou: A Unified Model for Personalized Segmentation and Retrieval

    Aug 30, 2026Gabriele Trivigno, Marcos Alfaro, Claudia Cuttano +3Image SegmentationInteractive Image Segmentation

    Politecnico di Torino · Miguel Hernández University of Elche · Valencian Graduate School and Research Network of Artificial Intelligence

  18. Sketch2Inspire: Structure-Sensitive Evaluation for Product Retrieval

    Aug 29, 2026Ge KongImage RetrievalIR Evaluation

    Beihang University

  19. Context-Aware Interpretable Representations for Retrieval and Graph Convolutional Network Classification

    Aug 29, 2026Thiago César Castilho Almeida, Gustavo Rosseto Letício, Vinicius Atsushi Sato Kawai +1Representation LearningGraph Representation Learning

    State University of São Paulo (UNESP) Rio Claro, São Paulo, Brazil

  20. PailitaoGR: Latent Think-with-Images for Generative Image Retrieval

    Aug 27, 2026Xiaomeng Fan, Yueran Liu, Shengyu Zhou +6Image RetrievalGenerative Retrieval

    Alibaba Group Hangzhou, China

  21. Image Augmentation as Test Generation for Deep Learning-Based Image Retrieval Systems

    Aug 27, 2026Yehan De Silva, Anirudh Sridhar, Armin Lotfy +6Data AugmentationImage Retrieval

    March Networks, Ottawa, ON, Canada

  22. PlaceSeek: Human-Centered Geospatial Retrieval of Urban Outdoor Places via Semantic Grounding and Affective Alignment

    Aug 25, 2026Ziqi Cui, Shangyu LouInformation RetrievalImage Retrieval

    University of California, Santa Barbara & San Diego State University California, USA

  23. Beyond Visual Similarity: Entity-Aligned Retrieval for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

    Aug 19, 2026Hangrui Xu, Zhengxian Wu, Yunyao Yu +6Knowledge-Based VQAVision-Language Retrieval

    Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University Shenzhen, China · University of Arizona Tucson, USA

  24. Composed Historical Image Retrieval by Modeling Temporal Representations

    Aug 19, 2026Adrià Molina Rodríguez, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Josep Lladós CanetTemporal Representation LearningRepresentation Learning

    Centre de Visió per Computador Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Bellaterra, Catalonia · Computer Science Department Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Catalonia

  25. MASCOT: Model-Aware Submodular Coverage for Composite-Attribute Text-to-Image Retrieval

    Aug 12, 2026Aaryan Sharma, Vishak Prasad C, Virendra Singh +1Vision-Language RetrievalImage Retrieval

    Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Department of Electrical Engineering Mumbai, India · Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Department of Computer Science and Engineering Mumbai, India

  26. Can Frontier LLMs Match Natively Multimodal Embeddings? A Comparison on Hard-Negative Text-to-Image Retrieval

    Aug 11, 2026Archan Dutta, Vyanktesh KanungoVLM EvaluationLLM Reranking

    Westcliff University

  27. FaLCon: Facet-Anchored Retrieval with Late Consensus for Sim2Real Text-Based Person Anomaly Search

    Aug 10, 2026Hieu Dinh Trung Pham, Phuong Huu Vu Tran, Thuan Duc Mai +6Text-Based Person SearchFine-Grained Image Retrieval

    PAMI Lab, Vietnamese-German University, Vietnam · Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam · Ho Chi Minh city University of Science, Vietnam +2

  28. CoCo-IR: Contextual Composed Image Retrieval

    Aug 5, 2026Shengcao Cao, Tanmaya Shekhar Dabral, Zhongli Ding +6Image RetrievalComposed Image Retrieval

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Google DeepMind · OpenAI. Work done at Google DeepMind.

  29. SeCo-SBIR: Semantically Consistent Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

    Aug 4, 2026Long Hoang Dang, Tuan Nguyen Huu, Nguyen Minh Hieu +1VLM AdaptationCross-Modal Retrieval

    Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology Ha Noi, Vietnam

  30. SynGallery: A Synthetic Gallery of Real Paintings for Instance-Level Artwork Recognition

    Jul 21, 2026Patryk Bartkowiak, Jakub Markil, Bartosz Kotrys +3Synthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationSynthetic Data Augmentation

    Adam Mickiewicz University · ArtiCollect · KAUST +1