# BIT: Matching-based Bi-directional Interaction Transformation Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14243 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14243/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [Re-ranking Person Re-identification with k-reciprocal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08398/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Dual-Attentive Aggregation Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09314/) (2020)
- [RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Person Re-Identification via Joint Pixel and Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05839/) (2019)
- [Part-Aligned Bilinear Representations for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07094/) (2018)
- [Cross-modality Person re-identification with Shared-Specific Feature Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12489/) (2020)
- [Diverse Embedding Expansion Network and Low-Light Cross-Modality Benchmark for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14481/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modality Paired-Images Generation for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04114/) (2020)
- [Hi-CMD: Hierarchical Cross-Modality Disentanglement for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01230/) (2019)
- [Neural Feature Search for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02366/) (2021)
- [Instruct-ReID: A Multi-purpose Person Re-identification Task with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07520/) (2023)
- [Learning Progressive Modality-shared Transformers for Effective Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00226/) (2022)
- [Shape-Erased Feature Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04205/) (2023)
- [Graph Sampling Based Deep Metric Learning for Generalizable Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01546/) (2021)
- [TransMatcher: Deep Image Matching Through Transformers for Generalizable Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14432/) (2021)
- [Modality Unifying Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06262/) (2023)
- [Modality-Adaptive Mixup and Invariant Decomposition for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01735/) (2022)
- [Implicit Discriminative Knowledge Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11708/) (2024)
- [PartMix: Regularization Strategy to Learn Part Discovery for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01537/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual Intervention Feature Transfer for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00967/) (2022)
- [From Poses to Identity: Training-Free Person Re-Identification via Feature Centralization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00938/) (2025)
- [CMTR: Cross-modality Transformer for Visible-infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08994/) (2021)
- [High-Order Structure Based Middle-Feature Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07853/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Deep Kronecker-Product Matching for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11182/) (2018)
- [MRCN: A Novel Modality Restitution and Compensation Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14626/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Towards Robust Text-to-Image Person Retrieval: Multi-View Reformulation for Semantic Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18376/) (2026)
- [CMCC-ReID: Cross-Modality Clothing-Change Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02808/) (2026)
- [Dual-Space Modality Consistency Learning for Universal Cross-Modal Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06943/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification (VI-ReID) is a challenging retrieval task due to the substantial modality gap between visible and infrared images. While existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by learning modality-invariant features within a shared embedding space, they often overlook the complex and implicit correlations between modalities. This limitation becomes more severe under distribution shifts, where infrared samples are often far fewer than visible ones. To address these challenges, we propose a novel network termed Bi-directional Interaction Transformation (BIT). Instead of relying on rigid feature alignment, BIT adopts a matching-based strategy that explicitly models the interaction between visible and infrared image pairs. Specifically, BIT employs an encoder-decoder architecture where the encoder extracts preliminary feature representations, and the decoder performs bi-directional feature integration and query aware scoring to enhance cross-modality correspondence. To our best knowledge, BIT is the first to introduce such pairwise matching-driven interaction in VI-ReID. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our BIT achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its effectiveness in the VI-ReID task.