Attribute-wise Explainable Fashion Compatibility Modeling

With the boom of the fashion market and people’s daily needs for beauty, clothing matching has gained increased research attention. In a sense, tackling this problem lies in modeling the human notions of the compatibility between fashion items, i.e., Fashion Compatibility Modeling (FCM), which plays an important role in a wide bunch of commercial applications, including clothing recommendation and dressing assistant. Recent advances in multimedia processing have shown remarkable effectiveness in accurate compatibility evaluation. However, these studies work like a black box and cannot provide appropriate explanations, which are indeed of importance for gaining users’ trust and improving their experience. In fact, fashion experts usually explain the compatibility evaluation through the matching patterns between fashion attributes (e.g., a silk tank top cannot go with a knit dress). Inspired by this, we devise an attribute-wise explainable FCM solution, named ExFCM, which can simultaneously generate the item-level compatibility evaluation for input fashion items and the attribute-level explanations for the evaluation result. In particular, ExFCM consists of two key components: attribute-wise representation learning and attribute interaction modeling. The former works on learning the region-aware attribute representation for each item with the threshold global average pooling. Besides, the latter is responsible for compiling the attribute-level matching signals into the overall compatibility evaluation adaptively with the attentive interaction mechanism. Note that ExFCM is trained without any attribute-level compatibility annotations, which facilitates its practical applications. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate that ExFCM can generate more accurate compatibility evaluations than the existing methods, together with reasonable explanations.