# MDReID: Modality-Decoupled Learning for Any-to-Any Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23301/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Omni-Scale Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00953/) (2019)
- [Harmonious Attention Network for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08122/) (2018)
- [CLIP-ReID: Exploiting Vision-Language Model for Image Re-Identification without Concrete Text Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13977/) (2022)
- [Diverse Part Discovery: Occluded Person Re-identification with Part-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04095/) (2021)
- [Counterfactual Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization and Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08728/) (2021)
- [Diverse Embedding Expansion Network and Low-Light Cross-Modality Benchmark for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14481/) (2023)
- [Multi-Level Factorisation Net for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09132/) (2018)
- [AAformer: Auto-Aligned Transformer for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00921/) (2021)
- [Multi-scale Deep Learning Architectures for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05165/) (2017)
- [Magic Tokens: Select Diverse Tokens for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10254/) (2024)
- [TOP-ReID: Multi-spectral Object Re-Identification with Token Permutation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09612/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Prototype Mask for Occluded Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09046/) (2022)
- [DeMo: Decoupled Feature-Based Mixture of Experts for Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10650/) (2024)
- [Heterogeneous Relational Complement for Vehicle Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07894/) (2021)
- [Transformer for Object Re-Identification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06960/) (2024)
- [MambaPro: Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification with Mamba Aggregation and Synergistic Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10707/) (2024)
- [UniCat: Crafting a Stronger Fusion Baseline for Multimodal Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18812/) (2023)
- [DC-Former: Diverse and Compact Transformer for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14335/) (2023)
- [RLE: A Unified Perspective of Data Augmentation for Cross-Spectral Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01225/) (2024)
- [PartFormer: Awakening Latent Diverse Representation from Vision Transformer for Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16684/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Enhancement Network for Partial Multi-modality Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15762/) (2023)
- [Other Tokens Matter: Exploring Global and Local Features of Vision Transformers for Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14985/) (2024)
- [GraFT: Gradual Fusion Transformer for Multimodal Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16856/) (2023)

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

- [AutoSOTA: An End-to-End Automated Research System for State-of-the-Art AI Model Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05550/) (2026)
- [Motion-Aware Caching for Efficient Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01725/) (2026)
- [Beyond Visual Cues: Semantic-Driven Token Filtering and Expert Routing for Anytime Person ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15090/) (2026)
- [ALGOGEN: Tool-Generated Verifiable Traces for Reliable Algorithm Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12159/) (2026)
- [FUSE: Frequency-domain Unification and Spectral Energy Alignment for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20044/) (2026)
- [Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification with Dual Semantic Guidance and Global-Local Mutual Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29207/) (2026)
- [Incentive Noise and Structural Prior Infusion for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24539/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world object re-identification (ReID) systems often face modality inconsistencies, where query and gallery images come from different sensors (e.g., RGB, NIR, TIR). However, most existing methods assume modality-matched conditions, which limits their robustness and scalability in practical applications. To address this challenge, we propose MDReID, a flexible any-to-any image-level ReID framework designed to operate under both modality-matched and modality-mismatched scenarios. MDReID builds on the insight that modality information can be decomposed into two components: modality-shared features that are predictable and transferable, and modality-specific features that capture unique, modality-dependent characteristics. To effectively leverage this, MDReID introduces two key components: the Modality Decoupling Learning (MDL) and Modality-aware Metric Learning (MML). Specifically, MDL explicitly decomposes modality features into modality-shared and modality-specific representations, enabling effective retrieval in both modality-aligned and mismatched scenarios. MML, a tailored metric learning strategy, further enforces orthogonality and complementarity between the two components to enhance discriminative power across modalities. Extensive experiments conducted on three challenging multi-modality ReID benchmarks (RGBNT201, RGBNT100, MSVR310) consistently demonstrate the superiority of MDReID. Notably, MDReID achieves significant mAP improvements of 9.8%, 3.0%, and 11.5% in general modality-matched scenarios, and average gains of 3.4%, 11.8%, and 10.9% in modality-mismatched scenarios, respectively. The code is available at: textcolormagentahttps://github.com/stone96123/MDReID.
