# Modality-Aware Bias Mitigation and Invariance Learning for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07760 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07760/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Self-paced Contrastive Learning with Hybrid Memory for Domain Adaptive Object Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02713/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Dual-Attentive Aggregation Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09314/) (2020)
- [EnD: Entangling and Disentangling deep representations for bias correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02023/) (2021)
- [Cluster Contrast for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11568/) (2021)
- [Causal Attention for Unbiased Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08782/) (2021)
- [Camera-aware Proxies for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10674/) (2020)
- [Multi-Centroid Representation Network for Domain Adaptive Person Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11689/) (2021)
- [Efficient Bilateral Cross-Modality Cluster Matching for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12673/) (2023)
- [RLE: A Unified Perspective of Data Augmentation for Cross-Spectral Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01225/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person ReID by Collaborative Learning with Neighbor-Guided Label Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12711/) (2023)
- [Equivariance and Invariance Inductive Bias for Learning from Insufficient Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12258/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised visible-infrared person re-identification (USVI-ReID) aims to match individuals across visible and infrared cameras without relying on any annotation. Given the significant gap across visible and infrared modality, estimating reliable cross-modality association becomes a major challenge in USVI-ReID. Existing methods usually adopt optimal transport to associate the intra-modality clusters, which is prone to propagating the local cluster errors, and also overlooks global instance-level relations. By mining and attending to the visible-infrared modality bias, this paper focuses on addressing cross-modality learning from two aspects: bias-mitigated global association and modality-invariant representation learning. Motivated by the camera-aware distance rectification in single-modality re-ID, we propose modality-aware Jaccard distance to mitigate the distance bias caused by modality discrepancy, so that more reliable cross-modality associations can be estimated through global clustering. To further improve cross-modality representation learning, a `split-and-contrast' strategy is designed to obtain modality-specific global prototypes. By explicitly aligning these prototypes under global association guidance, modality-invariant yet ID-discriminative representation learning can be achieved. While conceptually simple, our method obtains state-of-the-art performance on benchmark VI-ReID datasets and outperforms existing methods by a significant margin, validating its effectiveness.