Sohwi Lim, Lee Hyoseok, Jungjoon Park, and Prof. Tae-Hyun Oh received Excellence Paper Award (우수 논문상) from 2026 Samsung Electronics DS Industry-Academia Exchange Meeting (삼성전자 DS 산학협력 교류회)!
Paper Title: CLAY: Conditional Visual Similarity Modulation in Vision-Language Embedding Space
Abstract: Human perception of visual similarity is inherently adaptive and subjective, depending on the users' interests and focus. However, most image retrieval systems fail to reflect this flexibility, relying on a fixed, monolithic metric that cannot incorporate multiple conditions simultaneously. To address this, we propose CLAY, an adaptive similarity computation method that reframes the embedding space of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as a text-conditional similarity space without additional training. This design separates the textual conditioning process and visual feature extraction, allowing highly efficient and multi-conditioned retrieval with fixed visual embeddings. We also construct a synthetic evaluation dataset CLAY-EVAL, for comprehensive assessment under diverse conditioned retrieval settings. Experiments on standard datasets and our proposed dataset show that CLAY achieves high retrieval accuracy and notable computational efficiency compared to previous works.