# Confidence-guided Centroids for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11921 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11921/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Joint Discriminative and Generative Learning for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07223/) (2019)
- [Self-paced Contrastive Learning with Hybrid Memory for Domain Adaptive Object Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02713/) (2020)
- [Harmonious Attention Network for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08122/) (2018)
- [Person Re-identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02531/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Cluster Contrast for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11568/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Clustering with Hard-batch Triplet Loss for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12278/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Person Re-identification via Softened Similarity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03547/) (2020)
- [ICE: Inter-instance Contrastive Encoding for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16364/) (2021)
- [Camera-aware Proxies for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10674/) (2020)
- [Part-based Pseudo Label Refinement for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14675/) (2022)
- [Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09071/) (2020)
- [Self-training with progressive augmentation for unsupervised cross-domain person re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13315/) (2019)
- [Parsing-based View-aware Embedding Network for Vehicle Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05021/) (2020)
- [Intra-Inter Camera Similarity for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11658/) (2021)
- [IDM: An Intermediate Domain Module for Domain Adaptive Person Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02413/) (2021)
- [Refining Pseudo Labels with Clustering Consensus over Generations for Unsupervised Object Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06133/) (2021)
- [Joint Visual and Temporal Consistency for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10854/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Dynamic Clustering and Contrastive Refinement for Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16608/) (2025)
- [Similarity-based Outlier Detection for Noisy Object Re-Identification Using Beta Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08926/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) aims to train a feature extractor for identity retrieval without exploiting identity labels. Due to the blind trust in imperfect clustering results, the learning is inevitably misled by unreliable pseudo labels. Albeit the pseudo label refinement has been investigated by previous works, they generally leverage auxiliary information such as camera IDs and body part predictions. This work explores the internal characteristics of clusters to refine pseudo labels. To this end, Confidence-Guided Centroids (CGC) are proposed to provide reliable cluster-wise prototypes for feature learning. Since samples with high confidence are exclusively involved in the formation of centroids, the identity information of low-confidence samples, i.e., boundary samples, are NOT likely to contribute to the corresponding centroid. Given the new centroids, current learning scheme, where samples are enforced to learn from their assigned centroids solely, is unwise. To remedy the situation, we propose to use Confidence-Guided pseudo Label (CGL), which enables samples to approach not only the originally assigned centroid but other centroids that are potentially embedded with their identity information. Empowered by confidence-guided centroids and labels, our method yields comparable performance with, or even outperforms, state-of-the-art pseudo label refinement works that largely leverage auxiliary information.