# A Quantitative Evaluation of the Expressivity of BMI, Pose and Gender in Body Embeddings for Recognition and Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06451/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
- [Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11279/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning and the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02406/) (2015)
- [MINE: Mutual Information Neural Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04062/) (2018)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [Clothes-Changing Person Re-identification with RGB Modality Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06890/) (2022)
- [Beyond Appearance: a Semantic Controllable Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Human-Centric Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17602/) (2023)
- [The Bayesian Case Model: A Generative Approach for Case-Based Reasoning and Prototype Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01161/) (2015)
- [Identifying Unknown Instances for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11296/) (2019)
- [Pose-guided Feature Disentangling for Occluded Person Re-identification Based on Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02466/) (2021)
- [Learning Multi-Granular Hypergraphs for Video-Based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14913/) (2021)
- [Expanding Accurate Person Recognition to New Altitudes and Ranges: The BRIAR Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01917/) (2022)
- [Temporal Complementary Learning for Video Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09357/) (2020)
- [Multi-Granularity Reference-Aided Attentive Feature Aggregation for Video-based Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12224/) (2020)
- [PASS: Protected Attribute Suppression System for Mitigating Bias in Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03764/) (2021)
- [Towards Interpretable Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00611/) (2018)
- [FarSight: A Physics-Driven Whole-Body Biometric System at Large Distance and Altitude](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17206/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Face Recognition: Pride or Prejudiced?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01219/) (2019)
- [Explainable Person Re-Identification with Attribute-guided Metric Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01451/) (2021)
- [Pedestrian Models for Autonomous Driving Part II: High-Level Models of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11959/) (2020)
- [Temporal Knowledge Propagation for Image-to-Video Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03885/) (2019)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Networks in the Face of Caricature: Identity and Image Revealed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10902/) (2018)
- [DC-Former: Diverse and Compact Transformer for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14335/) (2023)
- [How are attributes expressed in face DCNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05657/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Encoding of Demographic and Anatomical Information in Chest X-Ray-based Severe Left Ventricular Hypertrophy Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03192/) (2025)
- [AttriBE: Quantifying Attribute Expressivity in Body Embeddings for Recognition and Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27218/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Person Re-identification (ReID) systems that match individuals across images or video frames are essential in many real-world applications. However, existing methods are often influenced by attributes such as gender, pose, and body mass index (BMI), which vary in unconstrained settings and raise concerns related to fairness and generalization. To address this, we extend the notion of expressivity, defined as the mutual information between learned features and specific attributes, using a secondary neural network to quantify how strongly attributes are encoded. Applying this framework to three ReID models, we find that BMI consistently shows the highest expressivity in the final layers, indicating its dominant role in recognition. In the last attention layer, attributes are ranked as BMI > Pitch > Gender > Yaw, revealing their relative influences in representation learning. Expressivity values also evolve across layers and training epochs, reflecting a dynamic encoding of attributes. These findings demonstrate the central role of body attributes in ReID and establish a principled approach for uncovering attribute driven correlations.