# Composed Multi-modal Retrieval: A Survey of Approaches and Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01334/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 146 of its 258 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 146)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [A Corpus for Reasoning About Natural Language Grounded in Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00491/) (2018)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06640/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Few-Shot Visual Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09458/) (2018)
- [X-CLIP: End-to-End Multi-grained Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07285/) (2022)
- [Image Retrieval on Real-life Images with Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04024/) (2021)
- [Composing Text and Image for Image Retrieval - An Empirical Odyssey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07119/) (2018)
- [ERNIE-ViL: Knowledge Enhanced Vision-Language Representations Through Scene Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16934/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DocPruner: A Storage-Efficient Framework for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Adaptive Patch-Level Embedding Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23883/) (2025)
- [CausalEmbed: Auto-Regressive Multi-Vector Generation in Latent Space for Visual Document Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21262/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The burgeoning volume of multi-modal data necessitates advanced retrieval paradigms beyond unimodal and cross-modal approaches. Composed Multi-modal Retrieval (CMR) emerges as a pivotal next-generation technology, enabling users to query images or videos by integrating a reference visual input with textual modifications, thereby achieving unprecedented flexibility and precision. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of CMR, covering its fundamental challenges, technical advancements, and applications. CMR is categorized into supervised, zero-shot, and semi-supervised learning paradigms. We discuss key research directions, including data construction, model architecture, and loss optimization in supervised CMR, as well as transformation frameworks and linear integration in zero-shot CMR, and semi-supervised CMR that leverages generated pseudo-triplets while addressing data noise/uncertainty. Additionally, we extensively survey the diverse application landscape of CMR, highlighting its transformative potential in e-commerce, social media, search engines, public security, etc. Seven high impact application scenarios are explored in detail with benchmark data sets and performance analysis. Finally, we further provide new potential research directions with the hope of inspiring exploration in other yet-to-be-explored fields. A curated list of works is available at: https://github.com/kkzhang95/Awesome-Composed-Multi-modal-Retrieval