# VietFashion: Benchmarking Sketch-Text Composed Image Retrieval for Cultural Outfits

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13427 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13427/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)
- [Image Retrieval on Real-life Images with Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04024/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval with Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15247/) (2023)
- [Doodle to Search: Practical Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03451/) (2019)
- [Deep Sketch Hashing: Fast Free-hand Sketch-Based Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05605/) (2017)
- [Composed Image Retrieval using Contrastive Learning and Task-oriented CLIP-based Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11485/) (2023)
- [A Sketch Is Worth a Thousand Words: Image Retrieval with Text and Sketch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03354/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Group: Composed Image Retrieval via Consensus Learning from Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02092/) (2023)
- [Composite Sketch+Text Queries for Retrieving Objects with Elusive Names and Complex Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08438/) (2025)
- [Hanfu-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark on Cross-Temporal Cultural Understanding and Transcreation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01565/) (2025)
- [Event-Enriched Image Analysis Grand Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2025](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18904/) (2025)
- [FIGROTD: A Friendly-to-Handle Dataset for Image Guided Retrieval with Optional Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22247/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cultural garments pose a unique challenge for visual retrieval systems, as their identity often depends on subtle structural and symbolic details that are poorly captured by standard AI models. We introduce VietFashion, a new benchmark for sketch-text composed image retrieval centered on the Ao Dai, a traditional Vietnamese garment. VietFashion enables designers and researchers to retrieve culturally meaningful outfits using a combination of hand-drawn sketches, which convey garment structure, and textual descriptions, which encode cultural semantics. The dataset is initialized with 650 sketches and expanded using generative models to produce over 21,000 photorealistic images with aligned captions. Textual prompts that describe detailed outfit attributes, which are extracted from fashion magazines to ensure authenticity and diversity. To better reflect the inherent ambiguity of design intent, VietFashion adopts a multi-target retrieval setting, where a single query may correspond to multiple valid results. We establish standardized evaluation protocols and benchmark state-of-the-art composed image retrieval methods. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps in modeling fine-grained cultural semantics and multi-modal composition, positioning VietFashion as a challenging benchmark for fine-grained fashion retrieval. The dataset is publicly available at: https://hng0303.github.io/VietFashion.