Ranking vs. Assignment: The Metric Mismatch in Multi-View Object Association

Multi-view object association is an important computer vision problem that underlies many multi-camera perception tasks. While this task is naturally formulated as a constrained one-to-one matching problem, recent works heavily rely on pairwise ranking metrics like AP and FPR-95 for model evaluation. We highlight a fundamental mismatch between these metrics and the actual assignment objective. Theoretically, we show that AP and FPR-95 can be imperfect even when the assignment is already correct, and that Sinkhorn-based normalization can make them perfect. Conversely, optimal pairwise ranking can still lead to incorrect assignments. We validate this mismatch in practice by using our Sinkhorn-based normalization as a controlled post-processing stress test. We show that optimizing just a few post-processing parameters significantly boosts AP and FPR-95 without corresponding improvements in assignment-level metrics such as ACC and IPAA.

Towards Resolving Optimization Conflicts Between Image- and Text-Based Person Re-Identification

The joint optimization of image-based (I2I) and text-based (T2I) person re-identification (ReID) is hindered by modality discrepancies and conflicting training objectives, leading to suboptimal shared representations. While I2I ReID focuses on identity-level invariance across images of the same person, T2I ReID is driven by instance-specific textual descriptions tied to unique visual traits. This paper explores the fundamental difference between two ReID tasks and their optimization processes for effective training. Since I2I and T2I ReID are often studied separately, the loss functions optimized for one retrieval setting may negatively affect the representation quality required by the other. Motivated by these findings, we propose a decoupled two-stage training pipeline for learning a shared representation across image and text modalities. The pipeline is based on a single vision encoder that supports both I2I and T2I retrieval while avoiding cross-task interference during training. We provide extensive experiments across multiple configurations, varying domain mixing procedures, learning strategies, and task objectives. We observed that I2I ReID pre-training positively impacts the generalization ability to T2I data. Besides, we find that incorporating textual supervision during the vision encoder training stage enhances both I2I and T2I performance. We believe our insights provide a meaningful step toward unified ReID systems and cross-modal retrieval overall.

ReText: Text Boosts Generalization in Image-Based Person Re-identification

Generalizable image-based person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to recognize individuals across cameras in unseen domains without retraining. While multiple existing approaches address the domain gap through complex architectures, recent findings indicate that better generalization can be achieved by stylistically diverse single-camera data. Although this data is easy to collect, it lacks complexity due to minimal cross-view variation. We propose ReText, a novel method trained on a mixture of multi-camera Re-ID data and single-camera data, where the latter is complemented by textual descriptions to enrich semantic cues. During training, ReText jointly optimizes three tasks: (1) Re-ID on multi-camera data, (2) image-text matching, and (3) image reconstruction guided by text on single-camera data. Experiments demonstrate that ReText achieves strong generalization and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on cross-domain Re-ID benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore multimodal joint learning on a mixture of multi-camera and single-camera data in image-based person Re-ID.

ReMix: Training Generalized Person Re-identification on a Mixture of Data

Modern person re-identification (Re-ID) methods have a weak generalization ability and experience a major accuracy drop when capturing environments change. This is because existing multi-camera Re-ID datasets are limited in size and diversity, since such data is difficult to obtain. At the same time, enormous volumes of unlabeled single-camera records are available. Such data can be easily collected, and therefore, it is more diverse. Currently, single-camera data is used only for self-supervised pre-training of Re-ID methods. However, the diversity of single-camera data is suppressed by fine-tuning on limited multi-camera data after pre-training. In this paper, we propose ReMix, a generalized Re-ID method jointly trained on a mixture of limited labeled multi-camera and large unlabeled single-camera data. Effective training of our method is achieved through a novel data sampling strategy and new loss functions that are adapted for joint use with both types of data. Experiments show that ReMix has a high generalization ability and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in generalizable person Re-ID. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explores joint training on a mixture of multi-camera and single-camera data in person Re-ID.