# An Empirical Study of CLIP for Text-based Person Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10045 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10045/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [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)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07783/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [SLIP: Self-supervision meets Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12750/) (2021)
- [Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05208/) (2021)
- [CLIP-NeRF: Text-and-Image Driven Manipulation of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05139/) (2021)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [TrivialAugment: Tuning-free Yet State-of-the-Art Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10158/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/) (2023)
- [CyCLIP: Cyclic Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14459/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [See Finer, See More: Implicit Modality Alignment for Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08608/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Identity-Aware Textual-Visual Matching with Latent Co-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01988/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Devils in Middle Layers of Large Vision-Language Models: Interpreting, Detecting and Mitigating Object Hallucinations via Attention Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16724/) (2024)
- [Number it: Temporal Grounding Videos like Flipping Manga](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10332/) (2024)
- [Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12662/) (2025)
- [Transformer for Object Re-Identification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06960/) (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)
- [MARS: Paying more attention to visual attributes for text-based person search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04287/) (2024)
- [Human-centered Interactive Learning via MLLMs for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11036/) (2025)
- [Modeling Thousands of Human Annotators for Generalizable Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09962/) (2025)
- [DGNS: Deformable Gaussian Splatting and Dynamic Neural Surface for Monocular Dynamic 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03910/) (2024)
- [CAMeL: Cross-modality Adaptive Meta-Learning for Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18782/) (2025)
- [Semi-supervised Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18106/) (2024)
- [Data Augmentation for Text-based Person Retrieval Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11971/) (2024)
- [Robust Duality Learning for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02549/) (2025)
- [What Makes You Unique? Attribute Prompt Composition for Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18715/) (2025)
- [CalibCLIP: Contextual Calibration of Dominant Semantics for Text-Driven Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05586/) (2025)
- [ITSELF: Attention Guided Fine-Grained Alignment for Vision-Language Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01024/) (2026)
- [Progressive Feature Mining and External Knowledge-Assisted Text-Pedestrian Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11994/) (2023)
- [AMNS: Attention-Weighted Selective Mask and Noise Label Suppression for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06385/) (2024)
- [Text-based Aerial-Ground Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08369/) (2025)
- [DiCo: Disentangled Concept Representation for Text-to-image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10053/) (2026)
- [Towards Robust Text-to-Image Person Retrieval: Multi-View Reformulation for Semantic Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18376/) (2026)
- [Efficient Vision Language Model Fine-tuning for Text-based Person Anomaly Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03230/) (2025)
- [Decoupled Cross-Modal Alignment Network for Text-RGBT Person Retrieval and A High-Quality Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07950/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of Validating Synthetic Data for Text-Based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22171/) (2025)
- [SA-Person: Text-Based Person Retrieval with Scene-aware Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24466/) (2025)
- [Cross-modal Full-mode Fine-grained Alignment for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13754/) (2025)
- [ForeSea: AI Forensic Search with Multi-modal Queries for Video Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22872/) (2026)
- [Harnessing Weak Pair Uncertainty for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08877/) (2026)
- [Multi-path Exploration and Feedback Adjustment for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21318/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-based Person Search (TBPS) aims to retrieve the person images using natural language descriptions. Recently, Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP), a universal large cross-modal vision-language pre-training model, has remarkably performed over various cross-modal downstream tasks due to its powerful cross-modal semantic learning capacity. TPBS, as a fine-grained cross-modal retrieval task, is also facing the rise of research on the CLIP-based TBPS. In order to explore the potential of the visual-language pre-training model for downstream TBPS tasks, this paper makes the first attempt to conduct a comprehensive empirical study of CLIP for TBPS and thus contribute a straightforward, incremental, yet strong TBPS-CLIP baseline to the TBPS community. We revisit critical design considerations under CLIP, including data augmentation and loss function. The model, with the aforementioned designs and practical training tricks, can attain satisfactory performance without any sophisticated modules. Also, we conduct the probing experiments of TBPS-CLIP in model generalization and model compression, demonstrating the effectiveness of TBPS-CLIP from various aspects. This work is expected to provide empirical insights and highlight future CLIP-based TBPS research.