NCL-CIR: Noise-aware Contrastive Learning for Composed Image Retrieval

Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) seeks to find a target image using a multi-modal query, which combines an image with modification text to pinpoint the target. While recent CIR methods have shown promise, they mainly focus on exploring relationships between the query pairs (image and text) through data augmentation or model design. These methods often assume perfect alignment between queries and target images, an idealized scenario rarely encountered in practice. In reality, pairs are often partially or completely mismatched due to issues like inaccurate modification texts, low-quality target images, and annotation errors. Ignoring these mismatches leads to numerous False Positive Pair (FFPs) denoted as noise pairs in the dataset, causing the model to overfit and ultimately reducing its performance. To address this problem, we propose the Noise-aware Contrastive Learning for CIR (NCL-CIR), comprising two key components: the Weight Compensation Block (WCB) and the Noise-pair Filter Block (NFB). The WCB coupled with diverse weight maps can ensure more stable token representations of multi-modal queries and target images. Meanwhile, the NFB, in conjunction with the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) predicts noise pairs by evaluating loss distributions, and generates soft labels correspondingly, allowing for the design of the soft-label based Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) loss function. Consequently, the overall architecture helps to mitigate the influence of mismatched and partially matched samples, with experimental results demonstrating that NCL-CIR achieves exceptional performance on the benchmark datasets.