# TIGER-FG: Text-Guided Implicit Fine-Grained Grounding for E-commerce Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18434/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07783/) (2021)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [The Faiss library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08281/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-VL-Embedding and Qwen3-VL-Reranker: A Unified Framework for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Retrieval and Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04720/) (2026)
- [GME: Improving Universal Multimodal Retrieval by Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16855/) (2024)
- [UniIR: Training and Benchmarking Universal Multimodal Information Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17136/) (2023)
- [MM-Embed: Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02571/) (2024)
- [Chinese CLIP: Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01335/) (2022)
- [MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis For Universal Multimodal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14475/) (2024)
- [jina-embeddings-v4: Universal Embeddings for Multimodal Multilingual Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18902/) (2025)
- [Product1M: Towards Weakly Supervised Instance-Level Product Retrieval via Cross-modal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14572/) (2021)
- [DeCLIP: Decoupled Learning for Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04410/) (2025)
- [M5Product: Self-harmonized Contrastive Learning for E-commercial Multi-modal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04275/) (2021)
- [CommerceMM: Large-Scale Commerce MultiModal Representation Learning with Omni Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07247/) (2022)
- [SmartCLIP: Modular Vision-language Alignment with Identification Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22264/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Benchmarks for Cross-modal Image-text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10824/) (2023)
- [UniECS: Unified Multimodal E-Commerce Search Framework with Gated Cross-modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13843/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

E-commerce image search often takes a cropped image as the query, while each candidate is represented by full item images and structured text. This image-to-multimodal retrieval setting presents two asymmetries: a modality disparity -- a visual query must match image--text items, and a granularity disparity -- a cropped query must be compared with full images containing background context and possible distractors. Detection-based pipelines handle the granularity disparity through explicit localization but incur extra cost and error propagation, whereas CLIP-style encoders avoid detection, but are vulnerable to backgrounds or irrelevant items. To address these limitations, we propose TIGER-FG, a text-guided implicit fine-grained grounding framework for image-to-multimodal e-commerce retrieval. TIGER-FG uses item text as semantic guidance to produce target-focused item representations without object detection for retrieval. We further introduce dual distillation objectives that preserve target-region spatial consistency and query--item similarity structure, yielding more stable and discriminative multimodal representations. In addition, we construct ECom-RF-IMMR, a realistic benchmark suite with a 10M-pair training set and two evaluation benchmarks covering standard and cluttered item layouts. TIGER-FG improves Recall@1 over the strongest baseline by 6.1 and 34.4 percentage points on the two evaluation benchmarks, respectively, with only 85.7M query-side parameters and 256-dim embeddings. Results on public e-commerce benchmarks further demonstrate its generalization to noisy and one-to-many retrieval scenarios. Code and data will be released.