# Automatic Synthesis of High-Quality Triplet Data for Composed Image Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05970 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05970/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [DragDiffusion: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Interactive Point-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14435/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval with Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15247/) (2023)
- [Pic2Word: Mapping Pictures to Words for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03084/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/) (2023)
- [Vision-by-Language for Training-Free Compositional Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09291/) (2023)
- ["This is my unicorn, Fluffy": Personalizing frozen vision-language representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01694/) (2022)
- [ARTEMIS: Attention-based Retrieval with Text-Explicit Matching and Implicit Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08101/) (2022)
- [Sentence-level Prompts Benefit Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05473/) (2023)
- [Modality-Agnostic Attention Fusion for visual search with text feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00145/) (2020)
- [Spherical Linear Interpolation and Text-Anchoring for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00571/) (2024)
- [Bi-directional Training for Composed Image Retrieval via Text Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16604/) (2023)
- [Knowledge-Enhanced Dual-stream Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16005/) (2024)
- [Candidate Set Re-ranking for Composed Image Retrieval with Dual Multi-modal Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16304/) (2023)
- [CaLa: Complementary Association Learning for Augmenting Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19149/) (2024)
- [Image2Sentence based Asymmetrical Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01431/) (2024)

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

- [Beyond Semantic Search: Towards Referential Anchoring in Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05393/) (2026)
- [Training-Free Pseudo-Fusion for Composed Image Retrieval with Diffusion Models and Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23102/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As a challenging vision-language (VL) task, Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images using multimodal (image+text) queries. Although many existing CIR methods have attained promising performance, their reliance on costly, manually labeled triplets hinders scalability and zero-shot capability. To address this issue, we propose a scalable pipeline for automatic triplet generation, along with a fully synthetic dataset named Composed Image Retrieval on High-quality Synthetic Triplets (CIRHS). Our pipeline leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate diverse prompts, controlling a text-to-image generative model to produce image pairs with identical elements in each pair, which are then filtered and reorganized to form the CIRHS dataset. In addition, we introduce Hybrid Contextual Alignment (CoAlign), a novel CIR framework, which can accomplish global alignment and local reasoning within a broader context, enabling the model to learn more robust and informative representations. By utilizing the synthetic CIRHS dataset, CoAlign achieves outstanding zero-shot performance on three commonly used benchmarks, demonstrating for the first time the feasibility of training CIR models on a fully synthetic dataset. Furthermore, under supervised training, our method outperforms all the state-of-the-art supervised CIR approaches, validating the effectiveness of our proposed retrieval framework. The code and the CIRHS dataset will be released soon.