# MODAL: Multi-Modal Object Re-ID via Model-Driven Sparse Decoupling and Text-Image Differential Filtering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15096/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Omni-Scale Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00953/) (2019)
- [Harmonious Attention Network for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08122/) (2018)
- [CLIP-ReID: Exploiting Vision-Language Model for Image Re-Identification without Concrete Text Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13977/) (2022)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Multi-modal Image Restoration and Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04066/) (2019)
- [CLIP-Driven Fine-grained Text-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10276/) (2022)
- [Improving Description-based Person Re-identification by Multi-granularity Image-text Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09610/) (2019)
- [Multi-Level Factorisation Net for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09132/) (2018)
- [Magic Tokens: Select Diverse Tokens for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10254/) (2024)
- [TOP-ReID: Multi-spectral Object Re-Identification with Token Permutation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09612/) (2023)
- [DeMo: Decoupled Feature-Based Mixture of Experts for Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10650/) (2024)
- [IDEA: Inverted Text with Cooperative Deformable Aggregation for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10324/) (2025)
- [Learned Convolutional Sparse Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00328/) (2017)
- [MambaPro: Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification with Mamba Aggregation and Synergistic Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10707/) (2024)
- [Cluster-guided Asymmetric Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07846/) (2021)
- [Coupled Dictionary Learning for Multi-contrast MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09930/) (2018)
- [Multi-spectral Vehicle Re-identification with Cross-directional Consistency Network and a High-quality Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00632/) (2022)
- [Person Re-identification via Attention Pyramid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05340/) (2021)
- [Learning Feature Recovery Transformer for Occluded Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01879/) (2023)
- [Learning to Purification for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09931/) (2022)
- [VGSG: Vision-Guided Semantic-Group Network for Text-based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07514/) (2023)
- [Flare-Aware Cross-modal Enhancement Network for Multi-spectral Vehicle Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13659/) (2023)
- [ICPL-ReID: Identity-Conditional Prompt Learning for Multi-Spectral Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17821/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Feature Pruning and Consolidation for Occluded Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14742/) (2022)
- [A Lightweight Deep Exclusion Unfolding Network for Single Image Reflection Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01938/) (2025)
- [Multiple Information Prompt Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00330/) (2024)
- [Relieving Universal Label Noise for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification by Inferring from Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12220/) (2024)
- [Signal: Selective Interaction and Global-local Alignment for Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17965/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal object re-identification (Re-ID) aims to facilitate cross-camera object retrieval in complex environments by leveraging complementary information from visual (e.g., RGB, NIR, TIR) and textual modalities. However, existing approaches often lack principled feature disentanglement and coherent multi-modal integration, leading to entangled representations that introduce cross-modal conflicts, obscure discriminative cues, and suffer distribution shift under modality-missing conditions. To tackle these challenges, we propose MODAL, a novel multi-modal object re-identification framework, grounded in coupled sparse coding theory and differential suppression principles. A core component of MODAL is a Multi-modal Feature Sparse Decoupling module, developed in a model-driven deep unrolling manner based on multi-modal coupled sparse coding. It explicitly decomposes multi-modal features into uni-modal specific, bi-modal and tri-modal shared representations, thereby achieving more transparent and effective feature disentanglement. Benefiting from the principled feature disentanglement, MODAL naturally mitigates performance degradation in incomplete-modality scenarios via a Modality-Aware Subspace Activation that selectively activates only the consistently shared subspaces. Moreover, we propose a Text-Image Differential Filtering module that leverages coarse-grained textual semantics to adaptively suppress task-irrelevant responses in the decoupled visual representations, thereby enhancing discriminative information. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that MODAL achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior transparency.