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Main Authors: Khan, Faizan Farooq, Stojnić, Vladan, Laskar, Zakaria, Elhoseiny, Mohamed, Tolias, Giorgos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00177
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author Khan, Faizan Farooq
Stojnić, Vladan
Laskar, Zakaria
Elhoseiny, Mohamed
Tolias, Giorgos
author_facet Khan, Faizan Farooq
Stojnić, Vladan
Laskar, Zakaria
Elhoseiny, Mohamed
Tolias, Giorgos
contents This work explores text-to-image retrieval for queries that specify or describe a semantic category. While vision-and-language models (VLMs) like CLIP offer a straightforward open-vocabulary solution, they map text and images to distant regions in the representation space, limiting retrieval performance. To bridge this modality gap, we propose a two-step approach. First, we transform the text query into a visual query using a generative diffusion model. Then, we estimate image-to-image similarity with a vision model. Additionally, we introduce an aggregation network that combines multiple generated images into a single vector representation and fuses similarity scores across both query modalities. Our approach leverages advancements in vision encoders, VLMs, and text-to-image generation models. Extensive evaluations show that it consistently outperforms retrieval methods relying solely on text queries. Source code is available at: https://github.com/faixan-khan/cletir
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00177
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Category-level Text-to-Image Retrieval Improved: Bridging the Domain Gap with Diffusion Models and Vision Encoders
Khan, Faizan Farooq
Stojnić, Vladan
Laskar, Zakaria
Elhoseiny, Mohamed
Tolias, Giorgos
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
This work explores text-to-image retrieval for queries that specify or describe a semantic category. While vision-and-language models (VLMs) like CLIP offer a straightforward open-vocabulary solution, they map text and images to distant regions in the representation space, limiting retrieval performance. To bridge this modality gap, we propose a two-step approach. First, we transform the text query into a visual query using a generative diffusion model. Then, we estimate image-to-image similarity with a vision model. Additionally, we introduce an aggregation network that combines multiple generated images into a single vector representation and fuses similarity scores across both query modalities. Our approach leverages advancements in vision encoders, VLMs, and text-to-image generation models. Extensive evaluations show that it consistently outperforms retrieval methods relying solely on text queries. Source code is available at: https://github.com/faixan-khan/cletir
title Category-level Text-to-Image Retrieval Improved: Bridging the Domain Gap with Diffusion Models and Vision Encoders
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00177