{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/visualized-text-to-image-retrieval","title":"Visualized Text-to-Image Retrieval","arxiv_id":"2505.20291","date":"2025-05-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Di wu","Yixin Wan","Kai-Wei Chang"],"abstract":"We propose Visualize-then-Retrieve (VisRet), a new paradigm for Text-to-Image (T2I) retrieval that mitigates the limitations of cross-modal similarity alignment of existing multi-modal embeddings. VisRet first projects textual queries into the image modality via T2I generation. Then, it performs retrieval within the image modality to bypass the weaknesses of cross-modal retrievers in recognizing subtle visual-spatial features. Experiments on three knowledge-intensive T2I retrieval benchmarks, including a newly introduced multi-entity benchmark, demonstrate that VisRet consistently improves T2I retrieval by 24.5% to 32.7% NDCG@10 across different embedding models. VisRet also significantly benefits downstream visual question answering accuracy when used in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. The method is plug-and-play and compatible with off-the-shelf retrievers, making it an effective module for knowledge-intensive multi-modal systems. Our code and the new benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/xiaowu0162/Visualize-then-Retrieve.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20291v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20291v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"visualized-text-to-image-retrieval","repo_url":"https://github.com/xiaowu0162/visualize-then-retrieve","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-retrieval","task_name":"Image Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval-augmented-generation","task_name":"Retrieval-augmented Generation"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}