# Zero-Shot Semantic Re-Identification for Autonomous Driving: A VLM Baseline Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09362 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09362/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLMs for autonomous driving, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 17 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [VLMs for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/driving/vlms-for-autonomous-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13514/) (2022)
- [CLIP-ReID: Exploiting Vision-Language Model for Image Re-Identification without Concrete Text Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13977/) (2022)
- [Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15804/) (2026)
- [Person Search with Natural Language Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05729/) (2017)
- [Training Sparse Mixture Of Experts Text Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07972/) (2025)
- [IDEA: Inverted Text with Cooperative Deformable Aggregation for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10324/) (2025)
- [ChatReID: Open-ended Interactive Person Retrieval via Hierarchical Progressive Tuning for Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19958/) (2025)
- [When Large Vision-Language Models Meet Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18111/) (2024)
- [NEXT: Multi-Grained Mixture of Experts via Text-Modulation for Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20001/) (2025)
- [Does Appearance Help? A Systematic Study of Image-Based Re-Identification in Online 3D Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07233/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Front-to-Back: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Asymmetric Cross-View Vehicle Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39492/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Re-Identification (ReID) in autonomous driving is typically formulated as a visual matching problem, where observations of vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists are associated across time, frames, or camera views using learned appearance embeddings, often complemented by motion, geometric, or multimodal cues. However, purely visual representations may be sensitive to viewpoint, occlusion, illumination, and sensor-domain variations, limiting their interpretability and robustness in complex driving scenes. We propose a baseline study of a zero-shot pipeline using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate textual descriptions of detected traffic participants and evaluate whether these descriptions can support identity matching across observations. Instead of relying only on low-level visual similarity, the proposed formulation represents each object through structured semantic attributes, including category, color, shape, pose, visible parts, spatial context, and distinctive visual cues. This study provides an initial benchmark for language-based re-identification in autonomous-driving scenarios, discussing and evaluating the strengths and limitations of current VLMs for this task. Results demonstrate that zero-shot semantic descriptions can support effective object re-identification, achieving retrieval performance comparable to a supervised CNN baseline while offering greater interpretability through explicit identity cues. However, the experiments also reveal important challenges, including attribute inconsistency across viewpoints and limited fine-grained discrimination between visually similar instances.