# Cross-modal Full-mode Fine-grained Alignment for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13754 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13754/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07783/) (2021)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/) (2023)
- [Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Patch Aligned Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04994/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Tree Transformer: Integrating Tree Structures into Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06639/) (2019)
- [See Finer, See More: Implicit Modality Alignment for Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08608/) (2022)
- [Contextual Non-Local Alignment over Full-Scale Representation for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03036/) (2021)
- [Learning Granularity-Unified Representations for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07802/) (2022)
- [Text-Based Person Search with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10807/) (2021)
- [RaSa: Relation and Sensitivity Aware Representation Learning for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13653/) (2023)
- [PLIP: Language-Image Pre-training for Person Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08386/) (2023)
- [Improving fine-grained understanding in image-text pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09865/) (2024)
- [Harnessing the Power of MLLMs for Transferable Text-to-Image Person ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04940/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [T2I-VeRW: Part-level Fine-grained Perception for Text-to-Image Vehicle Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06012/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-Image Person Retrieval (TIPR) is a cross-modal matching task designed to identify the person images that best correspond to a given textual description. The key difficulty in TIPR is to realize robust correspondence between the textual and visual modalities within a unified latent representation space. To address this challenge, prior approaches incorporate attention mechanisms for implicit cross-modal local alignment. However, they lack the ability to verify whether all local features are correctly aligned. Moreover, existing methods tend to emphasize the utilization of hard negative samples during model optimization to strengthen discrimination between positive and negative pairs, often neglecting incorrectly matched positive pairs. To mitigate these problems, we propose FMFA, a cross-modal Full-Mode Fine-grained Alignment framework, which enhances global matching through explicit fine-grained alignment and existing implicit relational reasoning -- hence the term ``full-mode'' -- without introducing extra supervisory signals. In particular, we propose an Adaptive Similarity Distribution Matching (A-SDM) module to rectify unmatched positive sample pairs. A-SDM adaptively pulls the unmatched positive pairs closer in the joint embedding space, thereby achieving more precise global alignment. Additionally, we introduce an Explicit Fine-grained Alignment (EFA) module, which makes up for the lack of verification capability of implicit relational reasoning. EFA strengthens explicit cross-modal fine-grained interactions by sparsifying the similarity matrix and employs a hard coding method for local alignment. We evaluate our method on three public datasets, where it attains state-of-the-art results among all global matching methods. The code for our method is publicly accessible at https://github.com/yinhao1102/FMFA.