FACap: A Large-scale Fashion Dataset for Fine-grained Composed Image Retrieval

The composed image retrieval (CIR) task is to retrieve target images given a reference image and a modification text. Recent methods for CIR leverage large pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) and achieve good performance on general-domain concepts like color and texture. However, they still struggle with application domains like fashion, because the rich and diverse vocabulary used in fashion requires specific fine-grained vision and language understanding. An additional difficulty is the lack of large-scale fashion datasets with detailed and relevant annotations, due to the expensive cost of manual annotation by specialists. To address these challenges, we introduce FACap, a large-scale, automatically constructed fashion-domain CIR dataset. It leverages web-sourced fashion images and a two-stage annotation pipeline powered by a VLM and a large language model (LLM) to generate accurate and detailed modification texts. Then, we propose a new CIR model FashionBLIP-2, which fine-tunes the general-domain BLIP-2 model on FACap with lightweight adapters and multi-head query-candidate matching to better account for fine-grained fashion-specific information. FashionBLIP-2 is evaluated with and without additional fine-tuning on the Fashion IQ benchmark and the enhanced evaluation dataset enhFashionIQ, leveraging our pipeline to obtain higher-quality annotations. Experimental results show that the combination of FashionBLIP-2 and pretraining with FACap significantly improves the model's performance in fashion CIR especially for retrieval with fine-grained modification texts, demonstrating the value of our dataset and approach in a highly demanding environment such as e-commerce websites. Code is available at https://fgxaos.github.io/facap-paper-website/.