# Unleashing the Potential of Pre-Trained Diffusion Models for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06619 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06619/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 60 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03126/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09673/) (2024)
- [Your Diffusion Model is Secretly a Zero-Shot Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16203/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Unlabeled Samples Generated by GAN Improve the Person Re-identification Baseline in vitro](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07717/) (2017)
- [Re-ranking Person Re-identification with k-reciprocal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08398/) (2017)
- [Towards Understanding Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13093/) (2021)
- [Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15233/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [DynaMix: Generalizable Person Re-identification via Dynamic Relabeling and Mixed Data Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19067/) (2025)
- [3D-LENS: A 3D Lifting-based Elevated Novel-view Synthesis method for Single-View Aerial-Ground Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26520/) (2026)
- [ReText: Text Boosts Generalization in Image-Based Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05785/) (2026)
- [Multi-Grained Vision-Language Alignment for Domain Generalized Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14012/) (2026)
- [AIDA-ReID: Adaptive Intermediate Domain Adaptation for Generalizable and Source-Free Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00111/) (2026)
- [Multimodal LLM-Empowered Re-Ranking for Generalizable Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16161/) (2026)
- [3D-VITAL: Visibility-aware Identity Training from Artificial Liftings of 3D Reconstruction model for Cross-View Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16692/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain-generalizable re-identification (DG Re-ID) aims to train a model on one or more source domains and evaluate its performance on unseen target domains, a task that has attracted growing attention due to its practical relevance. While numerous methods have been proposed, most rely on discriminative or contrastive learning frameworks to learn generalizable feature representations. However, these approaches often fail to mitigate shortcut learning, leading to suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose a novel method called diffusion model-assisted representation learning with a correlation-aware conditioning scheme (DCAC) to enhance DG Re-ID. Our method integrates a discriminative and contrastive Re-ID model with a pre-trained diffusion model through a correlation-aware conditioning scheme. By incorporating ID classification probabilities generated from the Re-ID model with a set of learnable ID-wise prompts, the conditioning scheme injects dark knowledge that captures ID correlations to guide the diffusion process. Simultaneously, feedback from the diffusion model is back-propagated through the conditioning scheme to the Re-ID model, effectively improving the generalization capability of Re-ID features. Extensive experiments on both single-source and multi-source DG Re-ID tasks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, providing insights into its robustness. Codes will be available at https://github.com/RikoLi/DCAC.