Open-World Fine-Grained Fashion Retrieval with LLM-based Commonsense Knowledge Infusion

Attribute-Specific Fashion Retrieval (ASFR) focuses on retrieving images based on fine-grained, attribute-specific criteria rather than naive global visual similarity, enabling more precise and interpretable search results. Existing ASFR methods ideally assume that all attribute semantics are in-domain distributions of the training datasets. However, realistic scenarios are generally more complex and naturally contain unseen attribute information, often resulting in ungeneralizable retrieval outcomes. In this paper, we take the first step to address the new and challenging open-world ASFR setting, which involves handling diverse and practical attributes instead of relying solely on predefined attribute sets in closed-world scenarios. Specifically, to comprehend unseen attributes, we propose a novel LLM-based Commonsense Knowledge Infusion (CoKi) framework that integrates commonsense knowledge as complementary context into attribute representations using a Large Language Model (LLM). By infusing such LLM-based commonsense knowledge through descriptive contexts, our method enables robust semantic enrichment and effective generalization to unseen attributes. Additionally, we introduce a modality-switchable prompt and an imputation mechanism to ensure model robustness across diverse input configurations by dynamically adapting to missing modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art in-domain retrieval performance but also significantly enhances adaptability to unseen attributes and cross-domain generalization, establishing a new benchmark for fine-grained fashion retrieval in open-world scenarios. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/CoKi.