Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Yang, Diji, Liu, Minghao, Lo, Chung-Hsiang, Zhang, Yi, Davis, James
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06220
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866909877327101952
author Yang, Diji
Liu, Minghao
Lo, Chung-Hsiang
Zhang, Yi
Davis, James
author_facet Yang, Diji
Liu, Minghao
Lo, Chung-Hsiang
Zhang, Yi
Davis, James
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on text-to-image retrieval benchmarks. However, bridging this success to real-world applications remains a challenge. In practice, human search behavior is rarely a one-shot action. Instead, it is often a multi-round process guided by clues in mind. That is, a mental image ranging from vague recollections to vivid mental representations of the target image. Motivated by this gap, we study the task of Mental Image Retrieval (MIR), which targets the realistic yet underexplored setting where users refine their search for a mentally envisioned image through multi-round interactions with an image search engine. Central to successful interactive retrieval is the capability of machines to provide users with clear, actionable feedback; however, existing methods rely on indirect or abstract verbal feedback, which can be ambiguous, misleading, or ineffective for users to refine the query. To overcome this, we propose GenIR, a generative multi-round retrieval paradigm leveraging diffusion-based image generation to explicitly reify the AI system's understanding at each round. These synthetic visual representations provide clear, interpretable feedback, enabling users to refine their queries intuitively and effectively. We further introduce a fully automated pipeline to generate a high-quality multi-round MIR dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that GenIR significantly outperforms existing interactive methods in the MIR scenario. This work establishes a new task with a dataset and an effective generative retrieval method, providing a foundation for future research in this direction
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06220
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GenIR: Generative Visual Feedback for Mental Image Retrieval
Yang, Diji
Liu, Minghao
Lo, Chung-Hsiang
Zhang, Yi
Davis, James
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on text-to-image retrieval benchmarks. However, bridging this success to real-world applications remains a challenge. In practice, human search behavior is rarely a one-shot action. Instead, it is often a multi-round process guided by clues in mind. That is, a mental image ranging from vague recollections to vivid mental representations of the target image. Motivated by this gap, we study the task of Mental Image Retrieval (MIR), which targets the realistic yet underexplored setting where users refine their search for a mentally envisioned image through multi-round interactions with an image search engine. Central to successful interactive retrieval is the capability of machines to provide users with clear, actionable feedback; however, existing methods rely on indirect or abstract verbal feedback, which can be ambiguous, misleading, or ineffective for users to refine the query. To overcome this, we propose GenIR, a generative multi-round retrieval paradigm leveraging diffusion-based image generation to explicitly reify the AI system's understanding at each round. These synthetic visual representations provide clear, interpretable feedback, enabling users to refine their queries intuitively and effectively. We further introduce a fully automated pipeline to generate a high-quality multi-round MIR dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that GenIR significantly outperforms existing interactive methods in the MIR scenario. This work establishes a new task with a dataset and an effective generative retrieval method, providing a foundation for future research in this direction
title GenIR: Generative Visual Feedback for Mental Image Retrieval
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06220