# Meta Clustering Learning for Large-scale Unsupervised Person Re-identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.10032 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10032/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [Person Transfer GAN to Bridge Domain Gap for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08565/) (2017)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [Re-ranking Person Re-identification with k-reciprocal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08398/) (2017)
- [Meta-Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03548/) (2018)
- [NormFace: L2 Hypersphere Embedding for Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06369/) (2017)
- [Mutual Mean-Teaching: Pseudo Label Refinery for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01526/) (2020)
- [Self-paced Contrastive Learning with Hybrid Memory for Domain Adaptive Object Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02713/) (2020)
- [Image-Image Domain Adaptation with Preserved Self-Similarity and Domain-Dissimilarity for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07027/) (2017)
- [Style Normalization and Restitution for Generalizable Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11037/) (2020)
- [Invariance Matters: Exemplar Memory for Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01990/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Person Re-identification via Multi-label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09228/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Pre-training for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03753/) (2020)
- [Cluster Contrast for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11568/) (2021)
- [Dissecting Person Re-identification from the Viewpoint of Viewpoint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02162/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Clustering with Hard-batch Triplet Loss for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12278/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Learning to Purification for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09931/) (2022)
- [Coarse Attribute Prediction with Task Agnostic Distillation for Real World Clothes Changing ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12580/) (2025)
- [Spatial Cascaded Clustering and Weighted Memory for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00261/) (2024)
- [Large-scale Fully-Unsupervised Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14278/) (2023)
- [Mutual Information Guided Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12758/) (2024)
- [MSP-ReID: Hairstyle-Robust Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01640/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised Person Re-identification (U-ReID) with pseudo labeling recently reaches a competitive performance compared to fully-supervised ReID methods based on modern clustering algorithms. However, such clustering-based scheme becomes computationally prohibitive for large-scale datasets. How to efficiently leverage endless unlabeled data with limited computing resources for better U-ReID is under-explored. In this paper, we make the first attempt to the large-scale U-ReID and propose a "small data for big task" paradigm dubbed Meta Clustering Learning (MCL). MCL only pseudo-labels a subset of the entire unlabeled data via clustering to save computing for the first-phase training. After that, the learned cluster centroids, termed as meta-prototypes in our MCL, are regarded as a proxy annotator to softly annotate the rest unlabeled data for further polishing the model. To alleviate the potential noisy labeling issue in the polishment phase, we enforce two well-designed loss constraints to promise intra-identity consistency and inter-identity strong correlation. For multiple widely-used U-ReID benchmarks, our method significantly saves computational cost while achieving a comparable or even better performance compared to prior works.