DAFM: Dynamic Adaptive Fusion for Multi-Model Collaboration in Composed Image Retrieval

Abstract

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a cross-modal task that aims to retrieve target images from large-scale databases using a reference image and a modification text. Most existing methods rely on a single model to perform feature fusion and similarity matching. However, this paradigm faces two major challenges. First, one model alone can't see the whole picture and the tiny details at the same time; it has to handle different tasks with the same weights, so it often misses the small but important links between image and text. Second, the absence of dynamic weight allocation prevents adaptive leveraging of complementary model strengths, so the resulting embedding drifts away from the target and misleads the nearest-neighbor search in CIR. To address these limitations, we propose Dynamic Adaptive Fusion (DAFM) for multi-model collaboration in CIR. Rather than optimizing a single method in isolation, DAFM exploits the complementary strengths of heterogeneous models and adaptively rebalances their contributions. This not only maximizes retrieval accuracy but also ensures that the performance gains are independent of the fusion order, highlighting the robustness of our approach. Experiments on the CIRR and FashionIQ benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements. Our method achieves a Recall@10 of 93.21 and an Rmean of 84.43 on CIRR, and an average Rmean of 67.48 on FashionIQ, surpassing recent strong baselines by up to 4.5%. These results confirm that dynamic multi-model collaboration provides an effective and general solution for CIR.