# Prompt-Guided Attention Head Selection for Focus-Oriented Image Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01348 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01348/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [A Metric Learning Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08505/) (2020)
- [Side Adapter Network for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12242/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [Exploring Visual Prompts for Adapting Large-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17274/) (2022)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [Large-Scale Image Retrieval with Attentive Deep Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06321/) (2016)
- [Composing Text and Image for Image Retrieval - An Empirical Odyssey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07119/) (2018)
- [Localizing Objects with Self-Supervised Transformers and no Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14279/) (2021)
- [AdaViT: Adaptive Vision Transformers for Efficient Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15668/) (2021)
- [What does CLIP know about a red circle? Visual prompt engineering for VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06712/) (2023)
- [Cut and Learn for Unsupervised Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11320/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11539/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of this paper is to enhance pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) models for focus-oriented image retrieval with visual prompting. In real-world image retrieval scenarios, both query and database images often exhibit complexity, with multiple objects and intricate backgrounds. Users often want to retrieve images with specific object, which we define as the Focus-Oriented Image Retrieval (FOIR) task. While a standard image encoder can be employed to extract image features for similarity matching, it may not perform optimally in the multi-object-based FOIR task. This is because each image is represented by a single global feature vector. To overcome this, a prompt-based image retrieval solution is required. We propose an approach called Prompt-guided attention Head Selection (PHS) to leverage the head-wise potential of the multi-head attention mechanism in ViT in a promptable manner. PHS selects specific attention heads by matching their attention maps with user's visual prompts, such as a point, box, or segmentation. This empowers the model to focus on specific object of interest while preserving the surrounding visual context. Notably, PHS does not necessitate model re-training and avoids any image alteration. Experimental results show that PHS substantially improves performance on multiple datasets, offering a practical and training-free solution to enhance model performance in the FOIR task.