Heterogeneous Uncertainty-Guided Composed Image Retrieval with Fine-Grained Probabilistic Learning

Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables image search by combining a reference image with modification text. Intrinsic noise in CIR triplets incurs intrinsic uncertainty and threatens the model's robustness. Probabilistic learning approaches have shown promise in addressing such issues; however, they fall short for CIR due to their instance-level holistic modeling and homogeneous treatment of queries and targets. This paper introduces a Heterogeneous Uncertainty-Guided (HUG) paradigm to overcome these limitations. HUG utilizes a fine-grained probabilistic learning framework, where queries and targets are represented by Gaussian embeddings that capture detailed concepts and uncertainties. We customize heterogeneous uncertainty estimations for multi-modal queries and uni-modal targets. Given a query, we capture uncertainties not only regarding uni-modal content quality but also multi-modal coordination, followed by a provable dynamic weighting mechanism to derive comprehensive query uncertainty. We further design uncertainty-guided objectives, including query-target holistic contrast and fine-grained contrasts with comprehensive negative sampling strategies, which effectively enhance discriminative learning. Experiments on benchmarks demonstrate HUG's effectiveness beyond state-of-the-art baselines, with faithful analysis justifying the technical contributions.