# Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18992/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [A Gentle Introduction to Conformal Prediction and Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07511/) (2021)
- [Conformal Prediction Under Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06019/) (2019)
- [A Corpus for Reasoning About Natural Language Grounded in Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00491/) (2018)
- [Classification with Valid and Adaptive Coverage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02544/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Conformal Inference Under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00170/) (2021)
- [A simple neural network module for relational reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01427/) (2017)
- [Image Retrieval on Real-life Images with Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04024/) (2021)
- [Composing Text and Image for Image Retrieval - An Empirical Odyssey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07119/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval with Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15247/) (2023)
- [Pic2Word: Mapping Pictures to Words for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03084/) (2023)
- [Multilevel Language and Vision Integration for Text-to-Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05113/) (2018)
- [CompoDiff: Versatile Composed Image Retrieval With Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11916/) (2023)
- [Dialog-based Interactive Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00145/) (2018)
- [Conformal Prediction Under Feedback Covariate Shift for Biomolecular Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03613/) (2022)
- [Towards Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Prompt-based Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08165/) (2022)
- [Modality-Agnostic Attention Fusion for visual search with text feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00145/) (2020)
- [Learning from the Scene and Borrowing from the Rich: Tackling the Long Tail in Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07585/) (2020)
- [Towards a Unified Transformer-based Framework for Scene Graph Generation and Human-object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01755/) (2023)
- [Fixed Anchors Are Not Enough: Dynamic Retrieval and Persistent Homology for Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24144/) (2026)
- [MuAP: Multi-step Adaptive Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Model with Missing Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04693/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.