# When Gender is Hard to See: Multi-Attribute Support for Long-Range Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06426 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06426/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [Improving Person Re-identification by Attribute and Identity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07220/) (2017)
- [Improving Pedestrian Attribute Recognition With Weakly-Supervised Multi-Scale Attribute-Specific Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04562/) (2019)
- [Rethinking of Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: A Reliable Evaluation under Zero-Shot Pedestrian Identity Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03576/) (2021)
- [Learning CLIP Guided Visual-Text Fusion Transformer for Video-based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10091/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of Mamba-based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10374/) (2024)
- [Pedestrian Attribute Recognition as Label-balanced Multi-label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04858/) (2024)
- [SNN-PAR: Energy Efficient Pedestrian Attribute Recognition via Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07857/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate gender recognition from extreme long-range imagery remains a challenging problem due to limited spatial resolution, viewpoint variability, and loss of facial cues. For such purpose, we present a dual-path transformer framework that leverages CLIP to jointly model visual and attribute-driven cues for gender recognition at a distance. The framework integrates two complementary streams: (1) a direct visual path that refines a pre-trained CLIP image encoder through selective fine-tuning of its upper layers, and (2) an attribute-mediated path that infers gender from a set of soft-biometric prompts (e.g., hairstyle, clothing, accessories) aligned in the CLIP text-image space. Spatial channel attention modules further enhance discriminative localization under occlusion and low resolution. To support large-scale evaluation, we construct U-DetAGReID, a unified long-range gender dataset derived from DetReIDx and AG-ReID.v2, harmonized under a consistent ternary labeling scheme (Male, Female, Unknown). Extensive experiments suggest that the proposed solution surpasses state-of-the-art person-attribute and re-identification baselines across multiple metrics (macro-F1, accuracy, AUC), with consistent robustness to distance, angle, and height variations. Qualitative attention visualizations confirm interpretable attribute localization and responsible abstention behavior. Our results show that language-guided dual-path learning offers a principled, extensible foundation for responsible gender recognition in unconstrained long-range scenarios.