# Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12501 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/

## Key facts

- Cited by 132 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 47 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Study of Training End-to-End Vision-and-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02387/) (2021)
- [Unifying Visual-Semantic Embeddings with Multimodal Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.2539/) (2014)
- [Person Search with Natural Language Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05729/) (2017)
- [Dual-Path Convolutional Image-Text Embeddings with Instance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05535/) (2017)
- [Semantically Self-Aligned Network for Text-to-Image Part-aware Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12666/) (2021)
- [DSSL: Deep Surroundings-person Separation Learning for Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05534/) (2021)
- [Thinking Fast and Slow: Efficient Text-to-Visual Retrieval with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16553/) (2021)
- [CLIP-Driven Fine-grained Text-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10276/) (2022)
- [ViTAA: Visual-Textual Attributes Alignment in Person Search by Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07327/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Representation Learning for Text-to-Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10534/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 132)

- [Noisy-Correspondence Learning for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09911/) (2023)
- [PLIP: Language-Image Pre-training for Person Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08386/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of CLIP for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10045/) (2023)
- [Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12662/) (2025)
- [iKUN: Speak to Trackers without Retraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16245/) (2023)
- [UFineBench: Towards Text-based Person Retrieval with Ultra-fine Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03441/) (2023)
- [IDEA: Inverted Text with Cooperative Deformable Aggregation for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10324/) (2025)
- [Cross-modal Active Complementary Learning with Self-refining Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17468/) (2023)
- [Transformer for Object Re-Identification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06960/) (2024)
- [Alignment-Free RGBT Salient Object Detection: Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network and A Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00917/) (2024)
- [All in One Framework for Multimodal Re-identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04741/) (2024)
- [Text-based Person Search without Parallel Image-Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12964/) (2023)
- [ChatReID: Open-ended Interactive Person Retrieval via Hierarchical Progressive Tuning for Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19958/) (2025)
- [PLOT: Text-based Person Search with Part Slot Attention for Corresponding Part Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13475/) (2024)
- [CONQUER: Context-Aware Representation with Query Enhancement for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18625/) (2026)
- [From Data Deluge to Data Curation: A Filtering-WoRA Paradigm for Efficient Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10292/) (2024)
- [Learning to Rematch Mismatched Pairs for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05105/) (2024)
- [MARS: Paying more attention to visual attributes for text-based person search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04287/) (2024)
- [Beyond Walking: A Large-Scale Image-Text Benchmark for Text-based Person Anomaly Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17776/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Uncertainty Learning with Noisy Correspondence for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06566/) (2025)
- [CLIP-based Synergistic Knowledge Transfer for Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09496/) (2023)
- [ICHPro: Intracerebral Hemorrhage Prognosis Classification Via Joint-attention Fusion-based 3d Cross-modal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11307/) (2024)
- [Test-time Adaptation for Cross-modal Retrieval with Query Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15624/) (2024)
- [Negative Pre-aware for Noisy Cross-modal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05777/) (2023)
- [DM-Adapter: Domain-Aware Mixture-of-Adapters for Text-Based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04144/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-ReID: Selective Multi-image Questioner for Interactive Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10174/) (2025)
- [Video-Level Language-Driven Video-Based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02439/) (2025)
- [Human-centered Interactive Learning via MLLMs for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11036/) (2025)
- [BiLMa: Bidirectional Local-Matching for Text-based Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04675/) (2023)
- [Modeling Thousands of Human Annotators for Generalizable Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09962/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image person retrieval aims to identify the target person based on a given textual description query. The primary challenge is to learn the mapping of visual and textual modalities into a common latent space. Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by leveraging separately pre-trained unimodal models to extract visual and textual features. However, these approaches lack the necessary underlying alignment capabilities required to match multimodal data effectively. Besides, these works use prior information to explore explicit part alignments, which may lead to the distortion of intra-modality information. To alleviate these issues, we present IRRA: a cross-modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning framework that learns relations between local visual-textual tokens and enhances global image-text matching without requiring additional prior supervision. Specifically, we first design an Implicit Relation Reasoning module in a masked language modeling paradigm. This achieves cross-modal interaction by integrating the visual cues into the textual tokens with a cross-modal multimodal interaction encoder. Secondly, to globally align the visual and textual embeddings, Similarity Distribution Matching is proposed to minimize the KL divergence between image-text similarity distributions and the normalized label matching distributions. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on all three public datasets, with a notable margin of about 3%-9% for Rank-1 accuracy compared to prior methods.