GeCo: Towards effective GAN-based fashion compatibility modeling and retrieval

Visual compatibility modeling is central to modern fashion recommendation systems. A key task is complementary item retrieval, where the goal is to identify a garment that harmonizes with a reference item, such as retrieving a compatible bottom for a given top. Recent generative approaches synthesize candidate garments to guide retrieval, but they either treat generation as an auxiliary signal or rely on computationally demanding architectures, limiting their practicality in large-scale deployments. In this work, we introduce GECO, a generative–compositional framework that couples image synthesis and retrieval within an effective, two-stage design. In the first stage, a conditional GAN generates visually coherent bottom templates from top images; in the second stage, the generated template and top form a composed visual query for compatibility-based retrieval. This decoupled design avoids the heavy optimization pipelines used in prior generative approaches, resulting in stable training and low computational cost, while allowing the generated images to guide compatibility modeling. Experiments on three benchmarks, including the new FashionTaobaoTB dataset released with this work, show that GECO offers competitive retrieval accuracy with a low memory footprint. Human evaluations further indicate that its generated items are perceived as realistic and stylistically compatible, supporting its suitability for practical, resource-constrained fashion recommendation scenarios.