Hao Chen

Cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to extract cloth-irrelevant visual features to match individuals across different outfits. While images contain rich visual cues, textual descriptions often provide explicit and structured attribute information, offering a potential pathway to decouple and suppress cloth-relevant features in visual representations. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt-guided decoupled feature learning framework that leverages text prompts to guide the learning of cloth-irrelevant features for CC-ReID. Given that human-annotated descriptions are typically unavailable in CC-ReID datasets, we explore the use of prompts generated by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as a substitute. To extract cloth-relevant features, we design a prompt-guided visual feature extractor that learns attribute-aware features aligned with the prompts. A decoupled feature learning module is then employed to suppress the cloth-relevant components from the raw visual features. Through this prompt-guided learning strategy, our framework is able to construct cloth-irrelevant representations. Extensive experiments on multiple CC-ReID benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, validating its effectiveness and robustness.

Vers la ré-identification de personnes non-supervisée: En tant que composant central des systèmes de vidéo-surveillance intelligents, la ré-identification de personnes (ReID) vise à rechercher une personne d'intérêt à travers des caméras qui ne se chevauchent pas. Malgré des améliorations significatives de la ReID supervisée, le processus d'annotation encombrant le rend moins évolutif dans les déploiements réels. De plus, comme les représentations d'apparence peuvent être affectées par des facteurs bruyants, tels que le niveau d'éclairage et les propriétés de la caméra, entre différents domaines, les modèles ReID de personnes subissent une baisse de performances importante en présence d'écarts de domaine. Nous sommes particulièrement intéressés par la conception d'algorithmes capables d'adapter un modèle ReID de personnes à un domaine cible sans supervision humaine. Dans un tel contexte, nous nous concentrons principalement sur la conception de méthodes d'adaptation de domaine non-supervisée et d'apprentissage de représentation non-supervisée pour le ReID de personnes.Dans cette thèse, nous explorons d'abord comment construire des représentations robustes en combinant à la fois des caractéristiques globales et locales sous la condition supervisée. Ensuite, vers un système ReID adaptatif au domaine non-supervisé, nous proposons trois méthodes non-supervisées pour la ReID de personnes, notamment 1) la distillation des connaissances enseignant-étudiant avec des structures de réseau asymétriques pour encourager la diversité des caractéristiques, 2) un cadre d'apprentissage conjoint génératif et contrastif qui génère des vues augmentées avec un réseau génératif pour l'apprentissage contrastif, et 3) explorer les relations inter-instances et concevoir des fonctions de perte conscientes des relations pour une meilleure ReID de personnes basée sur l'apprentissage contrastif.Nos méthodes ont été largement évaluées sur des benchmarks de ReID, tels que Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID et MSMT17. Les méthodes proposées surpassent considérablement les méthodes précédentes sur les benchmarks de ReID, poussant considérablement la ReID de personnes vers des déploiements dans le monde réel.

Weakly supervised group activity recognition (WSGAR) aims to identify the joint activity of a group of people without relying on hand-annotated human bounding boxes. Existing WSGAR methods typically acquire coarse human-level features by pooling from detected bounding boxes or applying human queries with cross attentions. These approaches focus on learning human relations from the acquired features. However, discriminative person-specific clues might be confused with irrelevant backgrounds, hindering the effectiveness of downstream human relation learning. To address this limitation, we propose a Human Feature Refinement framework that enhances human-level information with graph convolutional networks and self-attention. We define in-box regions as tokens and learn their spatial correspondence through GCN and self-attention. By explicitly extracting in-box details and suppressing irrelevant regions, our method acquires more discriminative human-level features for relation learning and group activity prediction. We further propose a Graph-based Token Merging algorithm to reduce the computation cost of Human Feature Refinement, while minimizing information loss and overfitting risk. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous WSGAR methods on Volleyball, NBA and JRDB-PAR benchmarks, with reduced computation cost.

Person search is a challenging task that aims to jointly detect and identify a target person from a large-scale scene image dataset. Fully supervised person search requires both bounding boxes and person identity annotations, making it hard to deploy in real-world applications. Although recent weakly supervised person search methods can alleviate annotation workloads, they often result in severe performance degradation when compared to supervised methods. To pursue better performance with a lower annotation budget, we propose to integrate active learning into weakly supervised person search, where a small number of pairwise identity annotations are actively acquired from oracles. Specifically, we propose a context-assisted active learning framework that selects informative instance pairs for labeling and refines pseudo labels for representation learning. The proposed framework consists of a split module and a merge module, which leverage two types of contextual cues for label refinement. Besides, a pairwise relationship predictor is introduced to estimate relations between instances so that annotation cost can be further reduced. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method could achieve comparable or even better performance than recent fully supervised methods at a much lower annotation cost. Notably, our method achieves 61.4% mAP on PRW dataset, which outperforms recent fully supervised methods at a much lower annotation cost.

Fine-grained text-to-image retrieval aims to retrieve a fine-grained target image with a given text query. Existing methods typically assume that each training image is accurately depicted by its textual descriptions. However, textual descriptions can be ambiguous and fail to depict discriminative visual details in images, leading to inaccurate representation learning. To alleviate the effects of text ambiguity, we propose a Multi-Modal Reference learning framework to learn robust representations. We first propose a multi-modal reference construction module to aggregate all visual and textual details of the same object into a comprehensive multi-modal reference. The multi-modal reference hence facilitates the subsequent representation learning and retrieval similarity computation. Specifically, a reference-guided representation learning module is proposed to use multi-modal references to learn more accurate visual and textual representations. Additionally, we introduce a reference-based refinement method that employs the object references to compute a reference-based similarity that refines the initial retrieval results. Extensive experiments are conducted on five fine-grained text-to-image retrieval datasets for different text-to-image retrieval tasks. The proposed method has achieved superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. For instance, on the text-to-person image retrieval dataset RSTPReid, our method achieves the Rank1 accuracy of 56.2%, surpassing the recent CFine by 5.6%.

Regular unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification (ReID) focuses on adapting a model from a source domain to a fixed target domain. However, an adapted ReID model can hardly retain previously-acquired knowledge and generalize to unseen data. In this paper, we propose a Dual-level Joint Adaptation and Anti-forgetting (DJAA) framework, which incrementally adapts a model to new domains without forgetting source domain and each adapted target domain. We explore the possibility of using prototype and instance-level consistency to mitigate the forgetting during the adaptation. Specifically, we store a small number of representative image samples and corresponding cluster prototypes in a memory buffer, which is updated at each adaptation step. With the buffered images and prototypes, we regularize the image-to-image similarity and image-to-prototype similarity to rehearse old knowledge. After the multi-step adaptation, the model is tested on all seen domains and several unseen domains to validate the generalization ability of our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the anti-forgetting, generalization and backward-compatible ability of an unsupervised person ReID model.

Recent advances in pre-trained vision-language models have successfully boosted the performance of unsupervised image representation in many vision tasks. Most of existing works focus on learning global visual features with Transformers and neglect detailed local cues, leading to suboptimal performance in fine-grained vision tasks. In this article, we propose a text-guided patch token exploitation framework to enhance the discriminative power of unsupervised representation by exploiting more detailed local features. Our text-guided decoder extracts local features with the guidance of texts or learned prompts describing discriminative object parts. We hence introduce a local-global relation distillation loss to promote the joint optimization of local and global features. The proposed method allows to flexibly extract either global or global-local features as the image representation. It significantly outperforms previous methods in fine-grained image retrieval and base-to-new fine-grained classification tasks. For instance, our Recall@1 metric surpasses the recent unsupervised retrieval method STML by 6.0% on the SOP dataset. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/maosnhehe/TPTE .

Regular unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification (ReID) focuses on adapting a model from a source domain to a fixed target domain. However, an adapted ReID model can hardly retain previously-acquired knowledge and generalize to unseen data. In this paper, we propose a Dual-level Joint Adaptation and Anti-forgetting (DJAA) framework, which incrementally adapts a model to new domains without forgetting source domain and each adapted target domain. We explore the possibility of using prototype and instance-level consistency to mitigate the forgetting during the adaptation. Specifically, we store a small number of representative image samples and corresponding cluster prototypes in a memory buffer, which is updated at each adaptation step. With the buffered images and prototypes, we regularize the image-to-image similarity and image-to-prototype similarity to rehearse old knowledge. After the multi-step adaptation, the model is tested on all seen domains and several unseen domains to validate the generalization ability of our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the anti-forgetting, generalization and backward-compatible ability of an unsupervised person ReID model.

This work focuses on unsupervised representation learning in person re-identification (ReID). Recent self-supervised contrastive learning methods learn invariance by maximizing the representation similarity between two augmented views of a same image. However, traditional data augmentation may bring to the fore undesirable distortions on identity features, which is not always favorable in id-sensitive ReID tasks. In this article, we propose to replace traditional data augmentation with a generative adversarial network (GAN) that is targeted to generate augmented views for contrastive learning. A 3D mesh guided person image generator is proposed to disentangle a person image into id-related and id-unrelated features. Deviating from previous GAN-based ReID methods that only work in id-unrelated space (pose and camera style), we conduct GAN-based augmentation on both id-unrelated and id-related features. We further propose specific contrastive losses to help our network learn invariance from id-unrelated and id-related augmentations. By jointly training the generative and the contrastive modules, our method achieves new state-of-the-art unsupervised person ReID performance on mainstream large-scale benchmarks.