# ViTAA: Visual-Textual Attributes Alignment in Person Search by Natural Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.07327 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07327/

## Key facts

- Cited by 78 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/) (2023)
- [Semantically Self-Aligned Network for Text-to-Image Part-aware Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12666/) (2021)
- [CLIP-Driven Fine-grained Text-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10276/) (2022)
- [Towards Unified Text-based Person Retrieval: A Large-scale Multi-Attribute and Language Search Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02898/) (2023)
- [See Finer, See More: Implicit Modality Alignment for Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08608/) (2022)
- [Contextual Non-Local Alignment over Full-Scale Representation for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03036/) (2021)
- [Learning Granularity-Unified Representations for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07802/) (2022)
- [TIPCB: A Simple but Effective Part-based Convolutional Baseline for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11628/) (2021)
- [Noisy-Correspondence Learning for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09911/) (2023)
- [Text-Based Person Search with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10807/) (2021)
- [RaSa: Relation and Sensitivity Aware Representation Learning for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13653/) (2023)
- [PLIP: Language-Image Pre-training for Person Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08386/) (2023)
- [Learning Semantic-Aligned Feature Representation for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06714/) (2021)
- [CAIBC: Capturing All-round Information Beyond Color for Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05773/) (2022)
- [Image-Specific Information Suppression and Implicit Local Alignment for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14365/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of CLIP for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10045/) (2023)
- [AXM-Net: Implicit Cross-Modal Feature Alignment for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08238/) (2021)
- [Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12662/) (2025)
- [UFineBench: Towards Text-based Person Retrieval with Ultra-fine Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03441/) (2023)
- [Transformer for Object Re-Identification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06960/) (2024)
- [Region Generation and Assessment Network for Occluded Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03558/) (2023)
- [Unified Pre-training with Pseudo Texts for Text-To-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01420/) (2023)
- [Asymmetric Cross-Scale Alignment for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11958/) (2022)
- [Text-based Person Search without Parallel Image-Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12964/) (2023)
- [GOAL: Global-local Object Alignment Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17782/) (2025)
- [PLOT: Text-based Person Search with Part Slot Attention for Corresponding Part Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13475/) (2024)
- [From Data Deluge to Data Curation: A Filtering-WoRA Paradigm for Efficient Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10292/) (2024)
- [VGSG: Vision-Guided Semantic-Group Network for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07514/) (2023)
- [MARS: Paying more attention to visual attributes for text-based person search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04287/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Uncertainty Learning with Noisy Correspondence for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06566/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Person search by natural language aims at retrieving a specific person in a large-scale image pool that matches the given textual descriptions. While most of the current methods treat the task as a holistic visual and textual feature matching one, we approach it from an attribute-aligning perspective that allows grounding specific attribute phrases to the corresponding visual regions. We achieve success as well as the performance boosting by a robust feature learning that the referred identity can be accurately bundled by multiple attribute visual cues. To be concrete, our Visual-Textual Attribute Alignment model (dubbed as ViTAA) learns to disentangle the feature space of a person into subspaces corresponding to attributes using a light auxiliary attribute segmentation computing branch. It then aligns these visual features with the textual attributes parsed from the sentences by using a novel contrastive learning loss. Upon that, we validate our ViTAA framework through extensive experiments on tasks of person search by natural language and by attribute-phrase queries, on which our system achieves state-of-the-art performances. Code will be publicly available upon publication.