Image-Text Retrieval

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Image-text retrieval studies how to find relevant images from text queries and relevant text from images, making large visual collections searchable in natural language. Many systems use CLIP-style dual encoders trained with contrastive learning to place images and text in a shared embedding space, while region-token alignment and reranking improve fine-grained matches. Benchmarks such as MSCOCO and Flickr30K test general caption retrieval, alongside domain-specific settings including radiology, remote sensing, fashion, and person search. A central challenge is moving beyond clean, short paired captions to handle long or compositional queries, noisy matches, subtle visual details, and shifts between training and deployment domains.

Latest papers

38 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Efficient Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval via Interaction-Free Recall and Text-Guided Reranking
Oct 27, 2026Xi Chen, Xu Chen, Xiamgyang Jia +3Image-Text Retrieval Cross-Modal Representation Learning
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), China
Mitigating Saliency Collapse: Robust Saliency-Aware Long-Text Image-Text Alignment
Oct 22, 2026Qiuyu Kong, Zanxi Ruan, Marco Cristani +1Vision-Language Alignment Image-Text Retrieval
Sapienza University of Rome · University of Verona · Reykjavik University +1
Hierarchical Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Alignment via Dynamic Granularity Discovery and Optimal Transport
Oct 22, 2026Pengfeng Song, Shaozhong Zhang, Pengfei ShaoImage-Text Retrieval Cross-Modal Alignment
College of Information and Intelligent Engineering,Zhejiang Wanli University,Ningbo,315100,Zhejiang,China.
MSGAT: Multi-Head Spiking Graph Attention with Similarity-Space Fusion for Image-Text Retrieval
Oct 8, 2026Xintao Zong, Wenxuan Liu, Jianhao Ding +2Image-Text Retrieval Cross-Modal Retrieval
Peking University
Quantum Entangled Multimodal Fusion Networks (QEMFN): Resource-Aware Hybrid Vision-Language Fusion via Trainable Entanglement
Oct 6, 2026Srikar Alla, Ali Shiri Sichani, Chi-Ren ShyuMultimodal Fusion Hybrid Quantum-Classical ML
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA · Institute for Data Science and Informatics, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
Generative Retrieval for Unsupervised Text-Based Person Search
Sep 11, 2026Mang Ye, Yucheng Ji, Yang Bai +4Text-Based Person Search Unsupervised 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
What Do Medical Vision-Language Models Learn in Radiology? Transfer, Alignment, and Source-Proxy Leakage Under Distribution Shift
Aug 26, 2026Ayoub Louaye Bouaziz, Lokmane Chebouba, Yassine HimeurMedical VLMs Radiology VLMs
LaTIM, Inserm, University of Western Brittany, Brest, France · University of Constantine, Algeria · University of Dubai, UAE
MorphoCLIP: Text-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Perturbation Matching in Cell Painting Images
Aug 24, 2026Sukhrobbek Ilyosbekov, Shubham Gajjar, Rongfei JinImage-Text Retrieval Microscopy Image Analysis
Northeastern University · Northeastern University Portland, ME, USA
AlignJEPA: Predictive Vision-Language Alignment for Remote Sensing Foundation Models
Aug 16, 2026Md Aminur Hossain, Omkumar Vaghasiya, Rajeev Ranjan Dwivedi +2Remote Sensing VLMs Vision-Language Alignment
Space Applications Centre, ISRO, Ahmedabad, India · Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, India · CSRE, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India
Rethinking Text-Based Image Retrieval in Specific Domain
Aug 11, 2026Jingyang Tan, Sheng Yang, Yuanpeng Chen +4Image-Text Retrieval Vision-Language Retrieval
Department of Electronic and Communication Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology · School of Data Science, Fudan University · Independent Researcher +1
GRASP: Granularity-Aware Region Alignment and Semantic Prototype Learning for Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Understanding in Drone Views
Aug 10, 2026Jiahui Cui, Yan Zhao, Kan Wei +4Vision-Language Models Fine-Grained Image Retrieval
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Key Laboratory of Target Cognition and Application Technology (TCAT), Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China +1
LightAIR: Lightweight Action Inversion and Riemannian Rectification for Text-based Person Anomaly Search
Aug 10, 2026Yulun Zhang, Zixu Li, Zhiwei Chen +6Text-Based Person Search Representation Disentanglement
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Shenzhen, China · Shandong University Jinan, China
DARAD: Dual Adapters and Ranking-Aware Distillation for Continual Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval
Aug 6, 2026Xi Chen, Xu Chen, Xiangyang Jia +3VLM Adaptation Image-Text Retrieval
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI)
A Paragraph is Worth a Thousand Captions: Rethinking Text Supervision for Vision-Language Retrieval
Aug 5, 2026Mahyar Ghazanfari, Amin Tabrizian, Arsyi Aziz +2Image-Text Retrieval Vision-Language Retrieval
The George Washington University
CXR-Retrieve: Compositional Text-to-Image Retrieval in Chest Radiography
Jul 30, 2026Tomer Erez, Moshe Kimhi, Chaim Baskin +1Contrastive Learning Medical Imaging
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology · Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
ZooClaw-FashionSigLIP2: Distilled Fine-tuning for Robust Fashion Retrieval
Jun 26, 2026Siqiao Xue, Chunxue XuVLM Robustness VLM Adaptation
SARLO-80: Worldwide Slant SAR Language Optic Dataset 80cm
Jun 18, 2026Solène Debuysère, Nicolas Trouvé, Nathan Letheule +2Image-Text Retrieval Cross-Modal Retrieval
1DEMR-ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab, Université Paris-Saclay, Palaiseau, France · 2DTIS-ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab, Université Paris-Saclay, Palaiseau, France · 3Hugging Face, London
Exploring Multi-Modal Large Language Models and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Fashion Image Retrieval
Jun 18, 2026Nguyen Cao Hoang, Hoang Bui Le, Nam Vo Hoang +1Multimodal Large Language Models Image-Text Retrieval
University of Science, VNU-HCM, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam · Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval
Jun 17, 2026Abdulmalik Alquwayfili, Faisal Almeshal, Jumanah Almajnouni +8Visual Representation Learning Fine-Grained Image Retrieval
Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
VietFashion: Benchmarking Sketch-Text Composed Image Retrieval for Cultural Outfits
Jun 11, 2026Hoang-Nguyen Cao, Le-Hoang Bui, Dinh-Khoi Vo +2Fine-Grained Image Retrieval Image-Text Retrieval
University of Science · Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · Vietnam National University
Bridging the Modality Gap in Forensic Image Retrieval
Jun 10, 2026Ricardo González-Gazapo, Annette Morales-González, Yoanna Martínez-Díaz +2Multimodal IR Digital Forensics
Advanced Technologies Application Center (CENATAV), Havana, Cuba · Centro de Sistemas Complejos, Facultad de Física, Universidad de La Habana, Havana, Cuba
ROGLE: Robust Global-Local Alignment with Automated Region Supervision for Text-Based Person Search
Jun 1, 2026Chaodong Jia, Zequn Xie, Xibei Jia +3Text-Based Person Search Image-Text Retrieval
FashionLens: Toward Versatile Fashion Image Retrieval via Task-Adaptive Learning
May 21, 2026Haokun Wen, Xuemeng Song, Xinghao Xie +3Multi-Task Learning Image-Text Retrieval
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen 518055, China · Department of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China +4
Open-SAT: LLM-Guided Query Embedding Refinement for Open-Vocabulary Object Retrieval in Satellite Imagery
May 6, 2026Md Adnan Arefeen, Biplob Debnath, Ravi K. Rajendran +2Remote Sensing Image Understanding Image-Text Retrieval
NEC Laboratories America Princeton, NJ, USA
Fast-then-Fine: A Two-Stage Framework with Multi-Granular Representation for Cross-Modal Retrieval in Remote Sensing
Apr 22, 2026Xi Chen, Xu Chen, Xiangyang Jia +3Representation Learning Cross-Modal Alignment
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), Beijing, China
mEOL: Training-Free Instruction-Guided Multimodal Embedder for Vector Graphics and Image Retrieval
Apr 18, 2026Kyeong Seon Kim, Baek Seong-Eun, Lee Jung-Mok +1Multimodal IR Multimodal Large Language Models
1KAIST · 2POSTECH
SIMMER: Cross-Modal Food Image--Recipe Retrieval via MLLM-Based Embedding
Apr 17, 2026Keisuke Gomi, Keiji YanaiCross-Modal Learning Image-Text Retrieval
The University of Electro-Communications
Representation geometry shapes task performance in vision-language modeling for CT enterography
Apr 14, 2026Cristian Minoccheri, Emily Wittrup, Kayvan Najarian +1Medical VLMs Medical Image Classification
Gilbert S. Omenn Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, 48104, MI, USA. · Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, 48104, MI, USA. · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, 1109 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, 48104, MI, USA. +1
Harnessing Weak Pair Uncertainty for Text-based Person Search
Apr 10, 2026Jintao Sun, Zhedong Zheng, Gangyi DingText-Based Person Search Image-Text Retrieval
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, China · Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, China
Pretrain-then-Adapt: Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Text-based Person Search
Apr 7, 2026Jiahao Zhang, Shaofei Huang, Yaxiong Wang +1Text-Based Person Search Test-Time Adaptation
University of Macau, Macau, China · Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China

Oct 27, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Efficient Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval via Interaction-Free Recall and Text-Guided Reranking

Xi Chen, Xu Chen, Xiamgyang Jia, Wei Wang+2

School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), China

Image-Text Retrieval Cross-Modal Representation Learning Multimodal Reranking Fine-Grained Image Retrieval

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Remote sensing (RS) image-text retrieval plays a critical role in understanding massive RS imagery. However, the dense multi-object distribution and complex backgrounds in RS imagery make it difficult to simultaneously achieve fine-grained cross-modal alignment and efficient retrieval. Existing methods either rely on complex cross-modal interactions that lead to low retrieval efficiency, or depend on large-scale vision-language adaptation, which requires massive data and computational resources. To address these issues, we develop a fast-then-fine (FTF) retrieval framework centered on interaction-free multi-granular recall and parameter-free text-guided cross-modal reranking with the Balanced Text-guided Interaction Block (BTIB). Specifically, interaction-free multi-granular recall pre-computes gallery embeddings and matches them with the corresponding query embedding without full-gallery token-level text-image interaction, while text-guided cross-modal reranking with BTIB refines local semantic correspondence within the top-K candidate set. Furthermore, an inter- and intra-modal loss is designed to jointly optimize cross-modal alignment across multi-granular representations. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that the FTF achieves competitive retrieval accuracy while significantly improving retrieval efficiency compared with existing methods.