# NearID: Identity Representation Learning via Near-identity Distractors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01973/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

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- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
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- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
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- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
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- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
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- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When evaluating identity-focused tasks such as personalized generation and image editing, existing vision encoders entangle object identity with background context, leading to unreliable representations and metrics. We introduce the first principled framework to address this vulnerability using Near-identity (NearID) distractors, where semantically similar but distinct instances are placed on the exact same background as a reference image, eliminating contextual shortcuts and isolating identity as the sole discriminative signal. Based on this principle, we present the NearID dataset (19K identities, 316K matched-context distractors) together with a strict margin-based evaluation protocol. Under this setting, pre-trained encoders perform poorly, achieving Sample Success Rates (SSR), a strict margin-based identity discrimination metric, as low as 30.7% and often ranking distractors above true cross-view matches. We address this by learning identity-aware representations on a frozen backbone using a two-tier contrastive objective enforcing the hierarchy: same identity > NearID distractor > random negative. This improves SSR to 99.2%, enhances part-level discrimination by 28.0%, and yields stronger alignment with human judgments on DreamBench++, a human-aligned benchmark for personalization. Project page: https://gorluxor.github.io/NearID/