ABE-CLIP: Training-Free Attribute Binding Enhancement for Compositional Image-Text Matching

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has achieved remarkable performance in various multimodal tasks. However, it still struggles with compositional image-text matching, particularly in accurately associating objects with their corresponding attributes, because its inherent global representation often overlooks fine-grained semantics for attribute binding. Existing methods often require additional training or extensive hard negative sampling, yet they frequently show limited generalization to novel compositional concepts and fail to fundamentally address the drawbacks of global representations. In this paper, we propose ABE-CLIP, a novel training-free Attribute Binding Enhancement method designed to strengthen attribute-object binding in CLIP-like models. Specifically, we employ a Semantic Refinement Mechanism to refine token embeddings for both object and attribute phrases in the text, thereby mitigating attribute confusion and improving semantic precision. We further introduce a Local Token-Patch Alignment strategy that computes similarity scores between refined textual tokens and their most relevant image patches. By aggregating localized similarity scores, ABE-CLIP computes the final image-text similarity. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that ABE-CLIP significantly improves attribute-object binding performance, even surpassing methods that require extensive training.

NTIRE 2025 Image Shadow Removal Challenge Report

This work examines the findings of the NTIRE 2025 Shadow Removal Challenge. A total of 306 participants have registered, with 17 teams successfully submitting their solutions during the final evaluation phase. Following the last two editions, this challenge had two evaluation tracks: one focusing on reconstruction fidelity and the other on visual perception through a user study. Both tracks were evaluated with images from the WSRD+ dataset, simulating interactions between self- and cast-shadows with a large number of diverse objects, textures, and materials.