Few-Shot Composition Learning for Image Retrieval with Prompt Tuning

Abstract

We study the problem of composition learning for image retrieval, for which we learn to retrieve target images with search queries in the form of a composition of a reference image and a modification text that describes desired modifications of the image. Existing models of composition learning for image retrieval are generally built with large-scale datasets, demanding extensive training samples, i.e., query-target pairs, as supervision, which restricts their application for the scenario of few-shot learning with only few query-target pairs available. Recently, prompt tuning with frozen pretrained language models has shown remarkable performance when the amount of training data is limited. Inspired by this, we propose a prompt tuning mechanism with the pretrained CLIP model for the task of few-shot composition learning for image retrieval. Specifically, we regard the representation of the reference image as a trainable visual prompt, prefixed to the embedding of the text sequence. One challenge is to efficiently train visual prompt with few-shot samples. To deal with this issue, we further propose a self-supervised auxiliary task via ensuring that the reference image can retrieve itself when no modification information is given from the text, which facilitates training for the visual prompt, while not requiring additional annotations for query-target pairs. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that our proposed model can yield superior performance when trained with only few query-target pairs.