# Harnessing the Power of MLLMs for Transferable Text-to-Image Person ReID

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04940/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Foundation Models: From Specialists to General-Purpose Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10020/) (2023)
- [ImageBind-LLM: Multi-modality Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03905/) (2023)
- [Semantically Self-Aligned Network for Text-to-Image Part-aware Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12666/) (2021)
- [Contextual Non-Local Alignment over Full-Scale Representation for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03036/) (2021)
- [Text-Based Person Search with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10807/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Distraction is All You Need for Multimodal Large Language Model Jailbreaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10794/) (2025)
- [Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12662/) (2025)
- [IDEA: Inverted Text with Cooperative Deformable Aggregation for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10324/) (2025)
- [GOAL: Global-local Object Alignment Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17782/) (2025)
- [ChatReID: Open-ended Interactive Person Retrieval via Hierarchical Progressive Tuning for Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19958/) (2025)
- [Beyond Walking: A Large-Scale Image-Text Benchmark for Text-based Person Anomaly Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17776/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-ReID: Selective Multi-image Questioner for Interactive Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10174/) (2025)
- [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)
- [CLIP-SCGI: Synthesized Caption-Guided Inversion for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09382/) (2024)
- [AnomalyLMM: Bridging Generative Knowledge and Discriminative Retrieval for Text-Based Person Anomaly Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04376/) (2025)
- [Gradient-Attention Guided Dual-Masking Synergetic Framework for Robust Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09118/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Prompt Learning for Image- and Text-Based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13575/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Pose-Semantic Gap: A Cascade Framework for Text-Based Person Anomaly Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23282/) (2026)
- [Diverse Semantics-Guided Feature Alignment and Decoupling for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00619/) (2025)
- [ITSELF: Attention Guided Fine-Grained Alignment for Vision-Language Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01024/) (2026)
- [Dual-Granularity Cross-Modal Identity Association for Weakly-Supervised Text-to-Person Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06744/) (2025)
- [Text-based Aerial-Ground Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08369/) (2025)
- [Children's Intelligence Tests Pose Challenges for MLLMs? KidGym: A 2D Grid-Based Reasoning Benchmark for MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20209/) (2026)
- [IoT-Brain: Grounding LLMs for Semantic-Spatial Sensor Scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08033/) (2026)
- [Towards Robust Text-to-Image Person Retrieval: Multi-View Reformulation for Semantic Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18376/) (2026)
- [An Empirical Study of Validating Synthetic Data for Text-Based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22171/) (2025)
- [Cross-modal Full-mode Fine-grained Alignment for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13754/) (2025)
- [Towards Global Localization using Multi-Modal Object-Instance Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12002/) (2024)
- [Evolution of ReID: From Early Methods to LLM Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13039/) (2025)
- [Find Them All: Unveiling MLLMs for Versatile Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06908/) (2025)
- [Skeletons Speak Louder than Text: A Motion-Aware Pretraining Paradigm for Video-Based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13150/) (2025)
- [Unified Multi-Dataset Training for TBPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14978/) (2026)
- [Unleashing MLLMs on the Edge: A Unified Framework for Cross-Modal ReID via Adaptive SVD Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12936/) (2026)
- [Cross-modal Fuzzy Alignment Network for Text-Aerial Person Retrieval and A Large-scale Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20721/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image person re-identification (ReID) retrieves pedestrian images according to textual descriptions. Manually annotating textual descriptions is time-consuming, restricting the scale of existing datasets and therefore the generalization ability of ReID models. As a result, we study the transferable text-to-image ReID problem, where we train a model on our proposed large-scale database and directly deploy it to various datasets for evaluation. We obtain substantial training data via Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Moreover, we identify and address two key challenges in utilizing the obtained textual descriptions. First, an MLLM tends to generate descriptions with similar structures, causing the model to overfit specific sentence patterns. Thus, we propose a novel method that uses MLLMs to caption images according to various templates. These templates are obtained using a multi-turn dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM). Therefore, we can build a large-scale dataset with diverse textual descriptions. Second, an MLLM may produce incorrect descriptions. Hence, we introduce a novel method that automatically identifies words in a description that do not correspond with the image. This method is based on the similarity between one text and all patch token embeddings in the image. Then, we mask these words with a larger probability in the subsequent training epoch, alleviating the impact of noisy textual descriptions. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods significantly boost the direct transfer text-to-image ReID performance. Benefiting from the pre-trained model weights, we also achieve state-of-the-art performance in the traditional evaluation settings.