# Semi-supervised Text-based Person Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18106 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18106/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2024.

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

- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05326/) (2018)
- [Scaling Language-Image Pre-training via Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00794/) (2022)
- [Beam Search Strategies for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01806/) (2017)
- [Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09848/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Learning the Best Pooling Strategy for Visual Semantic Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04305/) (2020)
- [Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/) (2023)
- [CurriculumNet: Weakly Supervised Learning from Large-Scale Web Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01097/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Towards Unified Text-based Person Retrieval: A Large-scale Multi-Attribute and Language Search Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02898/) (2023)
- [Improving Description-based Person Re-identification by Multi-granularity Image-text Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09610/) (2019)
- [Contextual Non-Local Alignment over Full-Scale Representation for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03036/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Human-centered Interactive Learning via MLLMs for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11036/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of Validating Synthetic Data for Text-Based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22171/) (2025)
- [Pretrain-then-Adapt: Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08598/) (2026)
- [Generative Retrieval for Unsupervised Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12965/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-based person search (TBPS) aims to retrieve images of a specific person from a large image gallery based on a natural language description. Existing methods rely on massive annotated image-text data to achieve satisfactory performance in fully-supervised learning. It poses a significant challenge in practice, as acquiring person images from surveillance videos is relatively easy, while obtaining annotated texts is challenging. The paper undertakes a pioneering initiative to explore TBPS under the semi-supervised setting, where only a limited number of person images are annotated with textual descriptions while the majority of images lack annotations. We present a two-stage basic solution based on generation-then-retrieval for semi-supervised TBPS. The generation stage enriches annotated data by applying an image captioning model to generate pseudo-texts for unannotated images. Later, the retrieval stage performs fully-supervised retrieval learning using the augmented data. Significantly, considering the noise interference of the pseudo-texts on retrieval learning, we propose a noise-robust retrieval framework that enhances the ability of the retrieval model to handle noisy data. The framework integrates two key strategies: Hybrid Patch-Channel Masking (PC-Mask) to refine the model architecture, and Noise-Guided Progressive Training (NP-Train) to enhance the training process. PC-Mask performs masking on the input data at both the patch-level and the channel-level to prevent overfitting noisy supervision. NP-Train introduces a progressive training schedule based on the noise level of pseudo-texts to facilitate noise-robust learning. Extensive experiments on multiple TBPS benchmarks show that the proposed framework achieves promising performance under the semi-supervised setting.