Patent attributes
The present embodiments provide visual search techniques which produces results that include both accurate similar items as well diversified items through attribute manipulation. In some embodiments, a feature vector describing the item of interest is obtained. A target feature vector is then generated at least partially from the original feature vector, in which the target feature vector shares only a subset of attribute values with the original feature vector and includes at least some values that are different from the original feature vector. An electronic catalog of items is then queried using the target feature vector, and a set of candidate items are determined from the electronic catalog based at least in part on similarity to the target feature vector. The original feature vector may be used to query for a set of similar items that are as similar as possible to the item of interest.