Thinking Before Retrieving: Robust Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval via Strategic Planning and Self-Criticism

Composed image retrieval requires identifying a target image from a gallery by integrating a reference image with a textual modification instruction. In a training-free zero-shot setting, this task relies on constructing a retrieval-oriented textual query within a frozen vision--language embedding space at inference time. Existing approaches predominantly rely on a single-pass generation strategy that fuses the reference context and modification text into a unified description. This strategy makes it difficult to detect or correct semantic distortions and omissions during generation. Consequently, the preservation of reference attributes and the integration of textual requirements interfere with each other, which degrades retrieval precision. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-CIR, a training-free framework that structures query construction as a multi-stage reasoning pipeline. The framework operates through a Planner--Executor--Critic architecture where the Planner extracts explicit constraints, the Executor generates multiple candidate target descriptions, and the Critic evaluates these candidates based on constraint compliance. By reframing query construction as a staged inference process instead of a single-pass output, PEC-CIR reduces the propagation of generative errors by explicitly evaluating candidate queries before retrieval, thereby improving retrieval stability.

RaDL: Relation-aware Disentangled Learning for Multi-Instance Text-to-Image Generation

With recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) models, effectively generating multiple instances within a single image prompt has become a crucial challenge. Existing methods, while successful in generating positions of individual instances, often struggle to account for relationship discrepancy and multiple attributes leakage. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the relation-aware disentangled learning (RaDL) framework. RaDL enhances instance-specific attributes through learnable parameters and generates relation-aware image features via Relation Attention, utilizing action verbs extracted from the global prompt. Through extensive evaluations on benchmarks such as COCO-Position, COCO-MIG, and DrawBench, we demonstrate that RaDL outperforms existing methods, showing significant improvements in positional accuracy, multiple attributes consideration, and the relationships between instances. Our results present RaDL as the solution for generating images that consider both the relationships and multiple attributes of each instance within the multi-instance image.