We contribute a new dataset and a novel method for natural language based fashion image retrieval. Unlike previous fashion datasets, we provide natural language annotations to facilitate the training of interactive image retrieval systems, as well as the commonly used attribute based labels. We propose a novel approach and empirically demonstrate that combining natural language feedback with visual attribute information results in superior user feedback modeling and retrieval performance relative to using either of these modalities. We believe that our dataset can encourage further work on developing more natural and real-world applicable conversational shopping assistants.
Learning with privileged information, i.e., side information that is available at training time but not at test time, is a popular machine learning paradigm @cite_38 , with many applications in computer vision @cite_9 @cite_16 . In the context of fashion, @cite_6 showed that visual attributes mined from online shopping stores serve as useful privileged information for cross-domain image retrieval. Text surrounding fashion images has also been used as side information to discover attributes @cite_32 , learn weakly supervised clothing representations @cite_25 , and improve search based on noisy and incomplete product descriptions @cite_47 . In our work, for the first time, we explore the use of side information to improve user feedback modeling and dialog-based image retrieval.
@cite_38 @cite_9 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_47 @cite_16 @cite_25
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We address the problem of cross-domain image retrieval, considering the following practical application: given a user photo depicting a clothing image, our goal is to retrieve the same or attribute-similar clothing items from online shopping stores. This is a challenging problem due to the large discrepancy between online shopping images, usually taken in ideal lighting pose background conditions, and user photos captured in uncontrolled conditions. To address this problem, we propose a Dual Attribute-aware Ranking Network (DARN) for retrieval feature learning. More specifically, DARN consists of two sub-networks, one for each domain, whose retrieval feature representations are driven by semantic attribute learning. We show that this attribute-guided learning is a key factor for retrieval accuracy improvement. In addition, to further align with the nature of the retrieval problem, we impose a triplet visual similarity constraint for learning to rank across the two subnetworks. Another contribution of our work is a large-scale dataset which makes the network learning feasible. We exploit customer review websites to crawl a large set of online shopping images and corresponding offline user photos with fine-grained clothing attributes, i.e., around 450,000 online shopping images and about 90,000 exact offline counterpart images of those online ones. All these images are collected from real-world consumer websites reflecting the diversity of the data modality, which makes this dataset unique and rare in the academic community. We extensively evaluate the retrieval performance of networks in different configurations. The top-20 retrieval accuracy is doubled when using the proposed DARN other than the current popular solution using pre-trained CNN features only (0.570 vs. 0.268). We address the problem of cross-domain image retrieval, considering the following practical application: given a user photo depicting a clothing image, our goal is to retrieve the same or attribute-similar clothing items from online shopping stores. This is a challenging problem due to the large discrepancy between online shopping images, usually taken in ideal lighting pose background conditions, and user photos captured in uncontrolled conditions. To address this problem, we propose a Dual Attribute-aware Ranking Network (DARN) for retrieval feature learning. More specifically, DARN consists of two sub-networks, one for each domain, whose retrieval feature representations are driven by semantic attribute learning. We show that this attribute-guided learning is a key factor for retrieval accuracy improvement. In addition, to further align with the nature of the retrieval problem, we impose a triplet visual similarity constraint for learning to rank across the two sub-networks. Another contribution of our work is a large-scale dataset which makes the network learning feasible. We exploit customer review websites to crawl a large set of online shopping images and corresponding offline user photos with fine-grained clothing attributes, i.e., around 450,000 online shopping images and about 90,000 exact offline counterpart images of those online ones. All these images are collected from real-world consumer websites reflecting the diversity of the data modality, which makes this dataset unique and rare in the academic community. We extensively evaluate the retrieval performance of networks in different configurations. The top-20 retrieval accuracy is doubled when using the proposed DARN other than the current popular solution using pre-trained CNN features only (0.570 vs. 0.268). Recognising detailed clothing characteristics (finegrained attributes) in unconstrained images of people inthe-wild is a challenging task for computer vision, especially when there is only limited training data from the wild whilst most data available for model learning are captured in well-controlled environments using fashion models (well lit, no background clutter, frontal view, high-resolution). In this work, we develop a deep learning framework capable of model transfer learning from well-controlled shop clothing images collected from web retailers to in-the-wild images from the street. Specifically, we formulate a novel Multi-Task Curriculum Transfer (MTCT) deep learning method to explore multiple sources of different types of web annotations with multi-labelled fine-grained attributes. Our multi-task loss function is designed to extract more discriminative representations in training by jointly learning all attributes, and our curriculum strategy exploits the staged easy-to-hard transfer learning motivated by cognitive studies. We demonstrate the advantages of the MTCT model over the state-of-the-art methods on the X-Domain benchmark, a large scale clothing attribute dataset. Moreover, we show that the MTCT model has a notable advantage over contemporary models when the training data size is small. We introduce a learning framework called learning using privileged information (LUPI) to the computer vision field. We focus on the prototypical computer vision problem of teaching computers to recognize objects in images. We want the computers to be able to learn faster at the expense of providing extra information during training time. As additional information about the image data, we look at several scenarios that have been studied in computer vision before: attributes, bounding boxes and image tags. The information is privileged as it is available at training time but not at test time. We explore two maximum-margin techniques that are able to make use of this additional source of information, for binary and multiclass object classification. We interpret these methods as learning easiness and hardness of the objects in the privileged space and then transferring this knowledge to train a better classifier in the original space. We provide a thorough analysis and comparison of information transfer from privileged to the original data spaces for both LUPI methods. Our experiments show that incorporating privileged information can improve the classification accuracy. Finally, we conduct user studies to understand which samples are easy and which are hard for human learning, and explore how this information is related to easy and hard samples when learning a classifier.