OmniVaT: Single Domain Generalization for Multimodal Visual-Tactile Learning

Visual-tactile learning (VTL) enables embodied agents to perceive the physical world by integrating visual (VIS) and tactile (TAC) sensors. However, VTL still suffers from modality discrepancies between VIS and TAC images, as well as domain gaps caused by non-standardized tactile sensors and inconsistent data collection procedures. We formulate these challenges as a new task, termed single domain generalization for multimodal VTL (SDG-VTL). In this paper, we propose an OmniVaT framework that, for the first time, successfully addresses this task. On the one hand, OmniVaT integrates a multimodal fractional Fourier adapter (MFFA) to map VIS and TAC embeddings into a unified embedding-frequency space, thereby effectively mitigating the modality gap without multi-domain training data or careful cross-modal fusion strategies. On the other hand, it also incorporates a discrete tree generation (DTG) module that obtains diverse and reliable multimodal fractional representations through a hierarchical tree structure, thereby enhancing its adaptivity to fluctuating domain shifts in unseen domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior cross-domain generalization performance of OmniVaT on the SDG-VTL task.

High-Order Structure Based Middle-Feature Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) aims to retrieve images of the same persons captured by visible (VIS) and infrared (IR) cameras. Existing VI-ReID methods ignore high-order structure information of features while being relatively difficult to learn a reasonable common feature space due to the large modality discrepancy between VIS and IR images. To address the above problems, we propose a novel high-order structure based middle-feature learning network (HOS-Net) for effective VI-ReID. Specifically, we first leverage a short- and long-range feature extraction (SLE) module to effectively exploit both short-range and long-range features. Then, we propose a high-order structure learning (HSL) module to successfully model the high-order relationship across different local features of each person image based on a whitened hypergraph network.This greatly alleviates model collapse and enhances feature representations. Finally, we develop a common feature space learning (CFL) module to learn a discriminative and reasonable common feature space based on middle features generated by aligning features from different modalities and ranges. In particular, a modality-range identity-center contrastive (MRIC) loss is proposed to reduce the distances between the VIS, IR, and middle features, smoothing the training process. Extensive experiments on the SYSU-MM01, RegDB, and LLCM datasets show that our HOS-Net achieves superior state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Jaulaucoeng/HOS-Net}.