# Camouflage-aware Image-Text Retrieval via Expert Collaboration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01251 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01251/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [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)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Simultaneously Localize, Segment and Rank the Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04011/) (2021)
- [Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14133/) (2020)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (2021)
- [Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02688/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty-aware Joint Salient Object and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02628/) (2021)
- [Order-Embeddings of Images and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06361/) (2015)
- [CAMP: Cross-Modal Adaptive Message Passing for Text-Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05506/) (2019)
- [Graph Structured Network for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00277/) (2020)
- [Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14816/) (2023)
- [Context-aware Cross-level Fusion Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12555/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Alignment and Fusion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17040/) (2024)
- [Dual-Level Collaborative Transformer for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06462/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Representation Learning for Text-to-Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10534/) (2019)
- [Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05370/) (2022)
- [ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20208/) (2023)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Camouflaged scene understanding (CSU) has attracted significant attention due to its broad practical implications. However, in this field, robust image-text cross-modal alignment remains under-explored, hindering deeper understanding of camouflaged scenarios and their related applications. To this end, we focus on the typical image-text retrieval task, and formulate a new task dubbed ``camouflage-aware image-text retrieval'' (CA-ITR). We first construct a dedicated camouflage image-text retrieval dataset (CamoIT), comprising ~10.5K samples with multi-granularity textual annotations. Benchmark results conducted on CamoIT reveal the underlying challenges of CA-ITR for existing cutting-edge retrieval techniques, which are mainly caused by objects' camouflage properties as well as those complex image contents. As a solution, we propose a camouflage-expert collaborative network (CECNet), which features a dual-branch visual encoder: one branch captures holistic image representations, while the other incorporates a dedicated model to inject representations of camouflaged objects. A novel confidence-conditioned graph attention (Ctextsuperscript2GA) mechanism is incorporated to exploit the complementarity across branches. Comparative experiments show that CECNet achieves ~29% overall CA-ITR accuracy boost, surpassing seven representative retrieval models. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/jiangyao-scu/CA-ITR.