# Back To The Drawing Board: Rethinking Scene-Level Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06566 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06566/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [CLIP for All Things Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval, Fine-Grained or Not](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13440/) (2023)
- [A Zero-Shot Framework for Sketch-based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11724/) (2018)
- [SketchyCOCO: Image Generation from Freehand Scene Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02683/) (2020)
- [Sketch Less for More: On-the-Fly Fine-Grained Sketch Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10310/) (2020)
- [StyleMeUp: Towards Style-Agnostic Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15706/) (2021)
- [FS-COCO: Towards Understanding of Freehand Sketches of Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02113/) (2022)
- [SketchyScene: Richly-Annotated Scene Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02473/) (2018)
- [FreestyleRet: Retrieving Images from Style-Diversified Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02428/) (2023)
- [I-Con: A Unifying Framework for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16929/) (2025)
- [Elevating All Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval Through Multimodal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04207/) (2024)
- [Modality-Aware Representation Learning for Zero-shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04860/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Train to Stitch: Topology-Preserving Regularization for Interoperable Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19401/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of Scene-level Sketch-Based Image Retrieval is to retrieve natural images matching the overall semantics and spatial layout of a free-hand sketch. Unlike prior work focused on architectural augmentations of retrieval models, we emphasize the inherent ambiguity and noise present in real-world sketches. This insight motivates a training objective that is explicitly designed to be robust to sketch variability. We show that with an appropriate combination of pre-training, encoder architecture, and loss formulation, it is possible to achieve state-of-the-art performance without the introduction of additional complexity. Extensive experiments on a challenging FS-COCO and widely-used SketchyCOCO datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach and underline the critical role of training design in cross-modal retrieval tasks, as well as the need to improve the evaluation scenarios of scene-level SBIR.