Noisy-Correspondence Learning for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification
Authors: Yang Qin, Yingke Chen, Dezhong Peng, Xi Peng, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Peng Hu

Text-to-image person re-identification (TIReID) is a compelling topic in the cross-modal community which aims to retrieve the target person based on a textual query. Although numerous TIReID methods have been proposed and achieved promising performance they implicitly assume the training image-text pairs are correctly aligned which is not always the case in real-world scenarios. In practice the image-text pairs inevitably exist under-correlated or even false-correlated a.k.a noisy correspondence (NC) due to the low quality of the images and annotation errors. To address this problem we propose a novel Robust Dual Embedding method (RDE) that can learn robust visual-semantic associations even with NC. Specifically RDE consists of two main components: 1) A Confident Consensus Division (CCD) module that leverages the dual-grained decisions of dual embedding modules to obtain a consensus set of clean training data which enables the model to learn correct and reliable visual-semantic associations. 2) A Triplet Alignment Loss (TAL) relaxes the conventional Triplet Ranking loss with the hardest negative samples to a log-exponential upper bound over all negative ones thus preventing the model collapse under NC and can also focus on hard-negative samples for promising performance. We conduct extensive experiments on three public benchmarks namely CUHK-PEDES ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReID to evaluate the performance and robustness of our RDE. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results both with and without synthetic noisy correspondences on all three datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/QinYang79/RDE.