OCTOPUS: Multi‑Agentic Universal Compositional Visual Retrieval

Composed visual retrieval (CVR) aims to locate a targetimage or video that reflects a user’s modification of a reference visualinput. Prior works typically design separate models for images and videos,resulting in fragmented paradigms, limited reasoning diversity, and pooradaptability to diverse user intents. We introduce OCTOPUS, a novelmulti-agentic assistant for tool-integrated progressive self-improvementand user-friendly synergistic compositional retrieval. OCTOPUS featuresthree cooperative agents – a Perceiver, a Creator, and a Retriever – thatcollectively emulate a human-like process of perception, imagination, andreflection. The Perceiver interprets composed queries, formulates seman-tic instructions, and refines them through self-reflection. The Creatoremploys visual imagination and object-level reasoning tools to generatediverse textual and visual proxies that capture missing or ambiguoussemantics. The Retriever performs bidirectional retrieval and applies anevaluation mechanism to ensure alignment between results and user intent.Comprehensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that OCTO-PUS consistently outperforms both training-free and supervised baselines.The code is available at https://github.com/zbzzbzzbz/OCTOPUS.