Attribute-Prompted Kernel Hashing for Unsupervised Data-Efficient Cross-Modal Retrieval

Unsupervised cross-modal hashing enables efficient retrieval of semantically related instances across different modalities without requiring manual semantic annotation. However, existing unsupervised methods rely heavily on large-scale image-text pairs. Collecting such data can be costly, particularly in scenarios where well-aligned pairs are scarce due to privacy and specialized constraints. More critically, existing methods tend to overfit to seen training data, restricting their generalization performance on unseen categories that the constrained training data cannot cover. To address these limitations, we propose Attribute-Prompted Kernel Hashing (APKH), a novel data-efficient approach that constructs a compact, modality-aligned Hamming space driven by the generalized attribute priors of vision-language foundation models. Specifically, APKH introduces two core modules: Context-optimized Attribute Kernel Mapping (CAKM) and Kernel-Smoothed Contrastive Alignment (KSCA). CAKM formulates cross-modal alignment through hyperspherical Radial Basis Function kernel mapping, optimizing dynamic attribute kernels via prompt learning to capture modality-invariant semantics. Furthermore, KSCA extends conventional point-to-point contrastive learning by modeling limited paired data as continuous kernel distributions. This explicit smoothing of the modality gap alleviates overfitting to sparse pairwise correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APKH outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods in the challenging cross-modal retrieval tasks from seen to unseen categories under data-constrained scenarios.