SAC: Semantic Attention Composition for Text-Conditioned Image Retrieval

Abstract: The ability to efficiently search for images is essential for improving the user experiences across various products. Incorporating user feedback, via multi-modal inputs, to navigate visual search can help tailor retrieved results to specific user queries. We focus on the task of text-conditioned image retrieval that utilizes support text feedback alongside a reference image to retrieve images that concurrently satisfy constraints imposed by both inputs. The task is challenging since it requires learning composite image-text features by incorporating multiple cross-granular semantic edits from text feedback and then applying the same to visual features. To address this, we propose a novel framework SAC which resolves the above in two major steps: "where to see" (Semantic Feature Attention) and "how to change" (Semantic Feature Modification). We systematically show how our architecture streamlines the generation of text-aware image features by removing the need for various modules required by other state-of-art techniques. We present extensive quantitative, qualitative analysis, and ablation studies, to show that our architecture SAC outperforms existing techniques by achieving state-of-the-art performance on 3 benchmark datasets: FashionIQ, Shoes, and Birds-to-Words, while supporting natural language feedback of varying lengths.