# Learning the Latent "Look": Unsupervised Discovery of a Style-Coherent Embedding from Fashion Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03376 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03376/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Conversational Fashion Image Retrieval via Multiturn Natural Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04128/) (2021)
- [VGSE: Visually-Grounded Semantic Embeddings for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10444/) (2022)
- [OutfitTransformer: Learning Outfit Representations for Fashion Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04812/) (2022)
- [ClothesNet: An Information-Rich 3D Garment Model Repository with Simulated Clothes Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09987/) (2023)
- [From Culture to Clothing: Discovering the World Events Behind A Century of Fashion Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01690/) (2021)
- [Limb-Aware Virtual Try-On Network with Progressive Clothing Warping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14074/) (2025)
- [Exploring AI in Fashion: A Review of Aesthetics, Personalization, Virtual Try-On, and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08301/) (2021)
- [I Want This Product but Different : Multimodal Retrieval with Synthetic Query Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08871/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Attribute-Object Compositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11373/) (2021)
- [Smart Fashion: A Review of AI Applications in the Fashion & Apparel Industry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00905/) (2021)
- [Seeing the Intangible: Survey of Image Classification into High-Level and Abstract Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10562/) (2023)
- [Progressive Limb-Aware Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12588/) (2025)
- [FashionSearchNet-v2: Learning Attribute Representations with Localization for Image Retrieval with Attribute Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14145/) (2021)
- [Imitation Learning for Fashion Style Based on Hierarchical Multimodal Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06229/) (2020)
- [Style Similarity as Feedback for Product Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12256/) (2021)
- [Fashionpedia-Taste: A Dataset towards Explaining Human Fashion Taste](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02307/) (2023)
- [Fashionpedia-Ads: Do Your Favorite Advertisements Reveal Your Fashion Taste?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02360/) (2023)
- [ICAR: Image-based Complementary Auto Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09119/) (2023)
- [Masked Language Prompting for Generative Data Augmentation in Few-shot Fashion Style Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19455/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

What defines a visual style? Fashion styles emerge organically from how people assemble outfits of clothing, making them difficult to pin down with a computational model. Low-level visual similarity can be too specific to detect stylistically similar images, while manually crafted style categories can be too abstract to capture subtle style differences. We propose an unsupervised approach to learn a style-coherent representation. Our method leverages probabilistic polylingual topic models based on visual attributes to discover a set of latent style factors. Given a collection of unlabeled fashion images, our approach mines for the latent styles, then summarizes outfits by how they mix those styles. Our approach can organize galleries of outfits by style without requiring any style labels. Experiments on over 100K images demonstrate its promise for retrieving, mixing, and summarizing fashion images by their style.