# Dynamic Multi-level Weighted Alignment Network for Zero-shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00925 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00925/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [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)
- [Prompt, Generate, then Cache: Cascade of Foundation Models makes Strong Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02151/) (2023)
- [Doodle to Search: Practical Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03451/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Deep Sketch Hashing: Fast Free-hand Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05605/) (2017)
- [Semantically Tied Paired Cycle Consistency for Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03372/) (2019)
- [I2MVFormer: Large Language Model Generated Multi-View Document Supervision for Zero-Shot Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02291/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Sketch-Image Hashing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02284/) (2018)
- [Semantic-Aware Knowledge Preservation for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03208/) (2019)
- [Sketch3T: Test-Time Training for Zero-Shot SBIR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14691/) (2022)
- [Using Language to Extend to Unseen Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09520/) (2022)
- [Doubly Right Object Recognition: A Why Prompt for Visual Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06202/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Everything Sketch-Based Image Retrieval, and in Explainable Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14348/) (2023)
- [Domain-Smoothing Network for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11841/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Sketch Based Image Retrieval using Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10185/) (2022)
- [Cross-Modal Attention Alignment Network with Auxiliary Text Description for zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00979/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) has achieved increasing attention due to its wide applications, e.g. e-commerce. Despite progress made in this field, previous works suffer from using imbalanced samples of modalities and inconsistent low-quality information during training, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce an approach called Dynamic Multi-level Weighted Alignment Network for ZS-SBIR. It consists of three components: (i) a Uni-modal Feature Extraction Module that includes a CLIP text encoder and a ViT for extracting textual and visual tokens, (ii) a Cross-modal Multi-level Weighting Module that produces an alignment weight list by the local and global aggregation blocks to measure the aligning quality of sketch and image samples, (iii) a Weighted Quadruplet Loss Module aiming to improve the balance of domains in the triplet loss. Experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., Sketchy, TU-Berlin, and QuickDraw, show our method delivers superior performances over the state-of-the-art ZS-SBIR methods.