Visual Words Meet BM25: Sparse Auto-Encoder Visual Word Scoring for Image Retrieval

Researchers introduce BM25-V, a new image retrieval method that combines sparse visual-word activations from Vision Transformers with BM25 scoring for efficient and interpretable image search. The approach achieves 99.3%+ recall across seven benchmarks while offering explainable results and serving as an efficient first-stage retriever for dense reranking systems.