# PersonMAE: Person Re-Identification Pre-Training with Masked AutoEncoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04496 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04496/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 75 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [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)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Omni-Scale Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00953/) (2019)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [Re-ranking Person Re-identification with k-reciprocal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08398/) (2017)
- [Mutual Mean-Teaching: Pseudo Label Refinery for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01526/) (2020)
- [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)
- [PeCo: Perceptual Codebook for BERT Pre-training of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12710/) (2021)
- [BEVT: BERT Pretraining of Video Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01529/) (2021)
- [A Strong Baseline and Batch Normalization Neck for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08332/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Masked Autoencoders are Stronger Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13532/) (2022)
- [ABD-Net: Attentive but Diverse Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01114/) (2019)

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

- [PersonViT: Large-scale Self-supervised Vision Transformer for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05398/) (2024)
- [Towards All-in-One Medical Image Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08173/) (2025)
- [Occlusion-Aware 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Masked AutoEncoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10816/) (2025)
- [Human Re-ID Meets LVLMs: What can we expect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18698/) (2025)
- [Learning Informative Attention Weights for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08961/) (2025)
- [Evolution of ReID: From Early Methods to LLM Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13039/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pre-training is playing an increasingly important role in learning generic feature representation for Person Re-identification (ReID). We argue that a high-quality ReID representation should have three properties, namely, multi-level awareness, occlusion robustness, and cross-region invariance. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective pre-training framework, namely PersonMAE, which involves two core designs into masked autoencoders to better serve the task of Person Re-ID. 1) PersonMAE generates two regions from the given image with RegionA as the input and textitRegionB as the prediction target. RegionA is corrupted with block-wise masking to mimic common occlusion in ReID and its remaining visible parts are fed into the encoder. 2) Then PersonMAE aims to predict the whole RegionB at both pixel level and semantic feature level. It encourages its pre-trained feature representations with the three properties mentioned above. These properties make PersonMAE compatible with downstream Person ReID tasks, leading to state-of-the-art performance on four downstream ReID tasks, i.e., supervised (holistic and occluded setting), and unsupervised (UDA and USL setting). Notably, on the commonly adopted supervised setting, PersonMAE with ViT-B backbone achieves 79.8% and 69.5% mAP on the MSMT17 and OccDuke datasets, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin of +8.0 mAP, and +5.3 mAP, respectively.