Paper Detail

CoCo-IR: Contextual Composed Image Retrieval

Shengcao Cao, Tanmaya Shekhar Dabral, Zhongli Ding, Madhuri Shanbhogue, Kaifeng Chen, Zhe Li, Mojtaba Seyedhosseini, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui

arxiv Score 14.2

Published 2026-08-05 · First seen 2026-08-06

General AI

Abstract

Current instruction-based image retrieval systems are powerful but limited to single-turn interactions, failing to capture the iterative nature of complex, real-world visual searches. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contextual Composed Image Retrieval (CoCo-IR), a novel task that enables users to progressively refine search results through interactions. We address this new task by proposing a new model based on a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) that functions as a context-aware reasoner for CoCo-IR. Our model interprets the entire interaction history to generate Transformable Image Embeddings (TIE) that evolve across turns. To fuel the model training without expensive human annotations, we develop a fully autonomous, scalable data engine that leverages LMMs to generate high-quality contextual retrieval data, and uses model-guided verification to mine challenging hard negatives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach establishes new state-of-the-art performance: We achieve 39.4 mAP@5 on the challenging single-turn benchmark CIRCO; furthermore, on our new CoCo-IR benchmark, our model maintains robust performance with 44.1 R@1 on 4-turn dialogues, dramatically outperforming existing methods (28.2 4-turn R@1) that fail to handle multi-turn context. Project page: https://CoCo-IR.github.io.

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BibTeX

@article{cao2026coco,
  title = {CoCo-IR: Contextual Composed Image Retrieval},
  author = {Shengcao Cao and Tanmaya Shekhar Dabral and Zhongli Ding and Madhuri Shanbhogue and Kaifeng Chen and Zhe Li and Mojtaba Seyedhosseini and Yu-Xiong Wang and Liang-Yan Gui},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Current instruction-based image retrieval systems are powerful but limited to single-turn interactions, failing to capture the iterative nature of complex, real-world visual searches. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contextual Composed Image Retrieval (CoCo-IR), a novel task that enables users to progressively refine search results through interactions. We address this new task by proposing a new model based on a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) that functions as a context-aware reasoner f},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05149},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2608.05149},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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