Shu Xiujun ; Wen Wei ; Wu Haoqian ; Chen Keyu ; Song Yiran ; Qiao Ruizhi ; Ren Bo ; Wang Xiao

Abstract

Text-based person retrieval aims to find the query person based on a textualdescription. The key is to learn a common latent space mapping betweenvisual-textual modalities. To achieve this goal, existing works employsegmentation to obtain explicitly cross-modal alignments or utilize attentionto explore salient alignments. These methods have two shortcomings: 1) Labelingcross-modal alignments are time-consuming. 2) Attention methods can exploresalient cross-modal alignments but may ignore some subtle and valuable pairs.To relieve these issues, we introduce an Implicit Visual-Textual (IVT)framework for text-based person retrieval. Different from previous models, IVTutilizes a single network to learn representation for both modalities, whichcontributes to the visual-textual interaction. To explore the fine-grainedalignment, we further propose two implicit semantic alignment paradigms:multi-level alignment (MLA) and bidirectional mask modeling (BMM). The MLAmodule explores finer matching at sentence, phrase, and word levels, while theBMM module aims to mine \textbf{more} semantic alignments between visual andtextual modalities. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate theproposed IVT on public datasets, i.e., CUHK-PEDES, RSTPReID, and ICFG-PEDES.Even without explicit body part alignment, our approach still achievesstate-of-the-art performance. Code is available at:https://github.com/TencentYoutuResearch/PersonRetrieval-IVT.