# Find Them All: Unveiling MLLMs for Versatile Person Re-identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06908 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06908/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Unlabeled Samples Generated by GAN Improve the Person Re-identification Baseline in vitro](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07717/) (2017)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [Person Search with Natural Language Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05729/) (2017)
- [Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/) (2023)
- [Semantically Self-Aligned Network for Text-to-Image Part-aware Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12666/) (2021)
- [UAV-Human: A Large Benchmark for Human Behavior Understanding with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00946/) (2021)
- [Dissecting Person Re-identification from the Viewpoint of Viewpoint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02162/) (2018)
- [Dual Cross-Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization and Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02151/) (2022)
- [Occluded Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02792/) (2018)
- [IDM: An Intermediate Domain Module for Domain Adaptive Person Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02413/) (2021)
- [Instruct-ReID: A Multi-purpose Person Re-identification Task with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07520/) (2023)
- [Harnessing the Power of MLLMs for Transferable Text-to-Image Person ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04940/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Multi-Source Domain Adaptation for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12961/) (2021)
- [IDEA: Inverted Text with Cooperative Deformable Aggregation for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10324/) (2025)
- [Domain Knowledge-Informed Self-Supervised Representations for Workout Form Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.14019/) (2022)
- [View-decoupled Transformer for Person Re-identification under Aerial-ground Camera Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14513/) (2024)
- [Transformer for Object Re-Identification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06960/) (2024)
- [Multi-Prompts Learning with Cross-Modal Alignment for Attribute-based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16797/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person ReID by Collaborative Learning with Neighbor-Guided Label Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12711/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-based Synthetic Data Generation for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12472/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Person re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve images of a target person from the gallery set, with wide applications in medical rehabilitation and public security. However, traditional person ReID models are typically uni-modal, resulting in limited generalizability across heterogeneous data modalities. Recently, the emergence of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has shown a promising avenue for addressing this issue. Despite this potential, existing methods merely regard MLLMs as feature extractors or caption generators, leaving their capabilities in person ReID tasks largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark for underlineVersatile underlinePerson underlineRe-underlineIDentification, termed VP-ReID. The benchmark includes 257,310 multi-modal queries and gallery images, covering ten diverse person ReID tasks. In addition, we propose two task-oriented evaluation schemes for MLLM-based person ReID. Extensive experiments demonstrate the impressive versatility, effectiveness, and interpretability of MLLMs in various person ReID tasks. Nevertheless, they also have limitations in handling a few modalities, particularly thermal and infrared data. We hope that VP-ReID can facilitate the community in developing more robust and generalizable cross-modal foundation models for person ReID.