Memory-Augmented Query Intent Understanding for Efficient Chat-based Image Retrieval

Different from traditional text-to-image retrieval tasks, chat-based image retrieval allows the human-interactive system to iteratively clarify and refine user intent through multi-round dialogue, thereby achieving more fine-grained retrieval results. The key challenge in this task lies in dynamically understanding and updating the user's query intent across dialogue rounds. Although existing works have achieved great performance on this new task, they simply handle history query information either by directly concatenating all previous queries into a long textual sequence or by relying on large language models to reconstruct the current query from history. Such strategies are computationally redundant and easily lead to inconsistent intent representations as the dialogue progresses. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes a novel and efficient memory-based user intent updating framework for the chat-based image retrieval task, called Memory-Augmented Query Intent Understanding (MAQIU). It introduces a lightweight memorization module that dynamically aggregates and evolves the semantic representation of query intent across dialogues, while a memory recall mechanism is further employed to prevent intent forgetting and enhance long-term semantic integrity. In addition, MAQIU also integrates historical image retrieval results as visual guidance, allowing the model to strengthen cross-round correlations and refine current visual understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAQIU achieves substantial performance gains while maintaining high computational efficiency, reducing dialogue encoding FLOPs by 86.4% compared with the prior baseline ChatIR. Source code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/MAQIU.