Animal re-identification (ReID) in camera-trap surveys remains challenging due to low image quality, strong variation in illumination and viewpoint, and highly imbalanced numbers of observations per individual. As a result, current ReID performance is often insufficient for fully automated use, and practical workflows typically depend on expert review of algorithmically proposed candidate matches. Moreover, most existing approaches focus almost exclusively on visual cues and overlook auxiliary information routinely available in field studies, such as image timestamps and camera-trap locations. We introduce Spotted, a location-informed, human-in-the-loop animal ReID framework that integrates visual similarity with spatio-temporal feasibility priors derived from camera locations, thereby reducing the amount of required expert review. Our method (i) computes an image-model-agnostic feasibility score based on the minimum travel speed required for two detections to correspond to the same individual, (ii) uses these feasibility cues as pseudo-supervision to train a lightweight head on top of a frozen visual foundation model, and (iii) fuses adapted visual similarity with spatio-temporal feasibility to obtain a robust pairwise matching score. We additionally integrate an active pair sampling strategy to accelerate annotation by initially prioritizing uncertain predictions. We evaluate Spotted on three challenging camera-trap ReID datasets comprised of spotted hyenas and leopards, which we release as part of this work. Our model improves average top-5 identification accuracy by 9pp, 2pp and 9pp over the best baseline on our LeopardID102, SpottedHyenaID109 and SpottedHyenaID415 datasets, respectively. Further, we show that our human-in-the-loop strategy reduces the number of queried comparisons by up to 69pp while achieving equivalent positive matches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00804
Reliable individual re-identification (re-ID) of wildlife is essential for population monitoring, behavioral tracking, and conservation policy evaluation, yet large-scale data collection remains labor-intensive, relying on manual efforts by ecologists or citizen scientists. We propose an autonomous drone navigation system that actively optimizes image capture for downstream re-ID, moving beyond passive aerial sensing. The system combines YOLOv11 object detection with a DINOv2-based pose classifier to guide real-time flight decisions: detecting animals, orienting to expose the lateral flank (the surface of interest for pattern-based re-ID), and approaching until the subject meets a minimum bounding-box threshold. Unlike prior drone systems that optimize for group-level behavioral video, ours targets the specific image-quality requirements of individual-identification models. We demonstrate feasibility through a case study on zebra using footage collected in Kenya, and show the approach generalizes to other species with diagnostic surface patterns, including giraffes, tigers, and elephants. Our work establishes a framework for task-aware embodied AI for ecological data collection, in which downstream re-ID requirements drive real-time perception and control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31772
Text-to-image person re-identification (TIPR) retrieves target persons using natural language descriptions. However, existing methods largely overlook resolution variance in real-world surveillance. They characterize cross-resolution TIPR through two coupled failure modes: Evidence Reliability Collapse (ERC), where degraded visual tokens become unreliable for grounding fine-grained text, and Ranking Distribution Drift (RDD), where mixed-resolution galleries distort similarity neighborhoods and destabilize retrieval rankings. To address this challenge, we propose Cross-Resolution Semantic Transfer (CRST), a CLIP-style framework with three modules: resolution-conditioned reasoning, text-guided refinement and CR-RDA. Resolution-conditioned reasoning estimates token reliability to suppress corrupted evidence. Text-guided refinement injects semantic priors to recover discriminative cues. CR-RDA transfers HR neighborhood geometry to stabilize LR ranking under mixed resolutions. Experiments on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid show that CRST improves ultra-low-resolution Rank-1 and mAP on average by 5.7% and 5.3%, while stabilizing mixed-resolution retrieval without sacrificing high-resolution this http URL code will be made publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30458
Long-horizon embodied manipulation requires agents to remember persistent objects, track changing scene states, and reuse prior interaction knowledge. However, existing agent memories are often stored as unstructured histories or embedding-based records, making it difficult to retrieve manipulation-relevant object parts, physical states, action effects, and executable skills. We propose an analytic concept-centric memory framework for agentic embodied manipulation. Our memory organizes experience around structured analytic concepts, where objects are represented by semantic parts, parametric templates, grounded poses, affordances, and manipulation states. It further connects object and scene memories with transition memory for action-induced state changes and skill memory for template-grounded and policy-grounded execution. At runtime, the agent performs structured coarse-to-fine retrieval to identify relevant objects, states, transitions, and skills, supporting state-consistent reasoning and skill reuse. Experiments on memory-dependent manipulation, articulated-object generalization, real-world memory evaluation, and ablations show that our approach improves task completion, retrieval accuracy, object re-identification, and cross-object skill generalization over unstructured and embedding-based memory baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29774
The widespread collection of fine-grained location data by commercial data brokers creates a re-identification risk that is not widely recognised by the public. While prior research has established that mobility traces are highly unique and that individuals can, in principle, be identified from a handful of spatio-temporal points, such attacks have historically required significant manual effort from skilled analysts, limiting their practical scale. In this feasibility study, we demonstrate in a real world setting that agentic AI fundamentally changes this threat model. We present an end-to-end pipeline in which large language model agents autonomously search the open web, cross-reference public records and social media, and resolve raw coordinate sequences to candidate identities - without human intervention. We evaluate the pipeline on a spatio-temporal dataset containing simulated location points anchored at and around true home and work addresses, focusing on a high-risk disclosure scenario. Our results demonstrate that, from spatio-temporal data and public sources alone, our agentic AI successfully re-identified 18 of the 25 re-identifiable individuals (72%) and 18 of 43 cases overall (41.9%). We discuss implications for Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) practice and outline the near-future escalation that data custodians and regulators must anticipate. De facto anonymity - an implicit foundation of SDC practice - is shifting. Agentic AI strengthens the case that re-identification is reasonably likely by any means under the GDPR Recital-26 standard, at costs of minutes-and-dollars per target.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27936
Despite significant progress in multi-modal Re-Identification (ReID), existing methods tend to emphasize low-frequency cues. Consequently, they focus on attributes such as color, illumination, and coarse appearance, while overlooking mid and high-frequency structures that encode geometric, textural, and identity-discriminative details. This imbalance leads to incomplete spectral representations and unstable cross-modal alignment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FUSE, a frequency-domain framework that reformulates multi-modal ReID as a two-stage process of spectral disentanglement and energy alignment. The proposed Spectral Decomposition Module (SDM) adaptively partitions features into low, mid, and high-frequency subspaces, enabling hierarchical spectral modeling. The Cross-Modal Alignment Module (CAM) further enforces energy alignment and subspace complementarity across modalities via frequency-consistency regularization. In addition, FUSE incorporates learnable frequency modulation to enhance robustness under varying illumination and heterogeneous sensor conditions. Extensive experiments on RGBNT201, RGBNT100, and MSVR310 show that FUSE achieves 9.1\% mAP and 9.5\% Rank-1 improvements, establishing an interpretable frequency-domain paradigm for multi-modal representation learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20044
The development of medical AI is constrained by limited access to high-quality clinical data due to institutional silos and strict privacy regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. Synthetic data generation offers a potential solution, but existing methods lack principled mechanisms to explicitly manage the privacy-utility trade-off, often degrading clinically meaningful patterns or risking patient re-identification. We present PSyGenTAB, a privacy-preserving generative framework that formulates synthetic healthcare data generation as a constrained optimization problem solved using the Augmented Lagrangian Method. By embedding configurable privacy constraints directly into model training, PSyGenTAB enforces minimum privacy thresholds while maximizing clinical data utility. Across multiple clinically motivated benchmarks, PSyGenTAB preserves inter-feature clinical relationships and minority-class diagnostic patterns essential for reliable health AI. Downstream evaluation using Train-on-Synthetic, Test-on-Real and Train-on-Real, Test-on-Synthetic protocols shows that models trained on synthetic data achieve performance comparable to those trained on real patient records. Privacy auditing further demonstrates reduced exact record reproduction and strong resilience to membership inference attacks. These results establish PSyGenTAB as a principled framework for balancing privacy protection and clinical utility in synthetic healthcare data, supporting secure cross-institutional AI development.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18518
Domain Generalizable (DG) person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted growing research interest due to its potential for deployment in unseen real-world scenarios. Most existing approaches address DG Re-ID by focusing on training domain-generalizable encoders but ignore the possible refinements in inference stage. In contrast, this work explores an alternative direction which improves inference re-ranking to enhance DG Re-ID. Conventional re-ranking methods typically rely on neighborhood-based distances to refine the initial ranking list, inherently depending on features produced by the Re-ID encoder. However, they deteriorate on target domains since the encoder lacks sufficient generalizability to produce reliable feature distances on unseen scenarios. Inspired by the remarkable generalization capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose an MLLM-empowered distance metric to improve re-ranking in DG Re-ID. Specifically, we first adapt an MLLM to Re-ID data through supervised fine-tuning, which incorporates a domain-agnostic prompt and a query-candidate hard mining scheme. Then, the adapted MLLM is employed to compute a $\mu$-distance during inference, which is robust to domain gap and significantly enhances subsequent re-ranking performance. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into previous re-ranking frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently yields substantial performance improvements across multiple DG Re-ID benchmarks. The code of this work will be released at this https URL soon.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16161
Cross-domain day-night re-identification (ReID) is fundamentally challenged by the substantial visual appearance discrepancies between daytime and nighttime scenes. Existing fully supervised methods rely heavily on labor-intensive annotations, which are costly and exhibit limited generalization across domains. In this work, we investigate unsupervised day-night ReID and propose a novel framework that synergistically combines prompt learning and prototype-based representation learning to associate identities across domains without requiring manual labels. Our approach follows a progressive two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we exploit the vision-language model to generate instance-specific textual prompts in an annotation-free manner. We employ an instance-level alignment mechanism to embed visual features and textual prompts into a unified semantic space, aligning unlabeled day/night images with learnable prompts via instance-aware dynamic-bias adaptation. In the second stage, we construct domain-specific prototype memory banks and introduce two complementary modules: i) an intra-domain identity association module to enhance feature discriminability within each domain, and ii) a cross-domain prototype matching module to reliably identify positive and negative prototype pairs, thereby establishing robust identity correspondences across day and night. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method. Under the unsupervised setting, our framework attains Rank-1 accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art fully supervised methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12258
Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is challenging due to the large modality discrepancy between visible and infrared images. We contend that this discrepancy is largely related to differing lighting conditions, including differences in light wavelength and light source type. Recently, frequency-based VI-ReID approaches have achieved notable success because frequency information can better extract identity-relevant contours and details while excluding irrelevant lighting and color. However, existing methods either do not distinguish different frequency bands or focus on only one band, which is insufficient under diverse lighting conditions. To perform comprehensive frequency domain learning, we propose a Multi-Frequency Expert Network (MFEN) that enables multi-frequency modulation and adaptively combines different bands through a mixture-of-experts design. We further introduce Random Frequency Augmentation (RFA) and Frequency Auxiliary Optimization (FAO) to better train MFEN. The three modules are complementary and jointly capture critical frequency-domain details for robust representation learning. Extensive experiments on three VI-ReID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12051
Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11661
Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14770
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09362
LiDAR-based 3D Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) typically relies solely on geometric information, which is often insufficient to distinguish between targets during prolonged occlusions or in crowded human-populated environments. While integrating RGB-based Re-Identification (ReID) offers a theoretical solution for preserving identity context, existing approaches often rely on computationally expensive parallel detectors that hinder real-time robot responsiveness. This work presents a systematic study of image-based ReID in online 3D MOT, utilizing a lightweight projection-based framework to decouple geometric and appearance modeling for mobile robots. A comprehensive analysis of feature extraction architectures is conducted, employing lightweight CNNs and Vision Transformers, and evaluating various multi-modal data association strategies to balance computational latency with robust tracking. Experiments on the Pedestrian class of the KITTI dataset reveal that naive linear fusion, of appearance and motion costs, degrades performance due to visual noise. Conversely, a cascaded matching strategy successfully recovers occluded tracks without compromising overall precision, effectively preventing identity switches to maintain human-robot interaction continuity. We show that lightweight architectures can offer an optimal trade-off between the low latency required for safe navigation and the discriminative power needed for social awareness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07233
Speech anonymization is commonly evaluated using averagecase metrics such as the equal error rate, which can hide large disparities in re-identification risks across individuals. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale per-speaker privacy analysis using a linkability-based metric under a worst-case scenario. Nearly 5,000 speakers are evaluated across multiple anonymization systems, attacker architectures, and conversation lengths. While linkability scores are highly polarized at the speaker level, the sets of easy to re-identify and hard to re-identify speakers vary substantially across configurations. We show that no single factor explains speaker vulnerability. Instead, the re-identification risk emerges from the interaction between the attacker, the anonymizer, and the amount of available speech. These results challenge the notion of intrinsic speaker-level privacy risks and emphasize the need for evaluation protocols that are explicitly conditioned on the attacker and anonymizer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07210
To enable meaningful human-robot interaction (HRI), a robot must continuously assess engagement by consistently tracking users over time. State-of-the-art computer vision models, however, are heavily optimized for surveillance or autonomous driving. A social robot faces distinct egocentric challenges, such as humans bouncing, obstructing each other, or leaving the frame. Frequent identity switches (IDSW) cause the robot to lose its footing mid-conversation. To address this, we introduce a novel, custom-annotated egocentric dataset collected via the Furhat robot to capture complex social dynamics. We present a systematic evaluation isolating detection errors from tracking logic, comparing face versus body tracking, and assessing the impact of extended spatial memory and appearance re-identification (ReID). Results indicate that increasing spatial memory mitigates prolonged occlusions but fails on complex dynamic events. Integrating ReID resolves complex switches but exhibits opposing effects: it substantially improves body tracking stability, yet causes facial IDSW to spike due to profile angle sensitivity. Ultimately, our optimized pipeline reduces IDSW by 49\%, mitigating interaction breakdowns. Because standard benchmarks lack dense, close-quarter occlusions, this work highlights the critical need for natively captured social dynamics to truly validate HRI perception models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03694
The joint optimization of image-based (I2I) and text-based (T2I) person re-identification (ReID) is hindered by modality discrepancies and conflicting training objectives, leading to suboptimal shared representations. While I2I ReID focuses on identity-level invariance across images of the same person, T2I ReID is driven by instance-specific textual descriptions tied to unique visual traits. This paper explores the fundamental difference between two ReID tasks and their optimization processes for effective training. Since I2I and T2I ReID are often studied separately, the loss functions optimized for one retrieval setting may negatively affect the representation quality required by the other. Motivated by these findings, we propose a decoupled two-stage training pipeline for learning a shared representation across image and text modalities. The pipeline is based on a single vision encoder that supports both I2I and T2I retrieval while avoiding cross-task interference during training. We provide extensive experiments across multiple configurations, varying domain mixing procedures, learning strategies, and task objectives. We observed that I2I ReID pre-training positively impacts the generalization ability to T2I data. Besides, we find that incorporating textual supervision during the vision encoder training stage enhances both I2I and T2I performance. We believe our insights provide a meaningful step toward unified ReID systems and cross-modal retrieval overall.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02242
Vehicle re-identification focuses on retrieving images of the same vehicle from a gallery given a query image. Upon closer inspection of commonly used datasets, we observe that vehicles with few visual differences-e.g., the same make, model, and color-appear in both the training and test sets. As a result, methods that effectively memorize the training data tend to perform well on these test sets but struggle to generalize to other datasets. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a novel evaluation approach that more effectively measures generalization capability to unseen vehicle types. To further study generalization performance, we also propose splitting the evaluation based on view, allowing us to differentiate the effect of viewpoint robustness from that of same-view re-identification. Our findings reveal that most state-of-the-art methods struggle with unseen vehicle types, and that their robustness to viewpoint changes and attention to detail are limited to vehicle types seen during training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01981
Thermal pedestrian MOT remains challenging because weak appearance cues and frequent detection interruptions cause severe trajectory fragmentation. We study whether lightweight post-processing can recover identity continuity without relying on heavy re-identification models or complex online association. Starting from a YOLOv8 and SORT baseline, we add a modular identity-repair backend consisting of online short-gap remapping and offline tracklet relinking based on temporal, spatial, motion, and border cues. Controlled ablations on a fixed validation split and evaluation on the official PBVS Thermal Pedestrian MOT benchmark show that the main identity gains arise from conservative relinking, improving IDF1 from 82.25 to 84.93 while preserving MOTA, whereas many heuristic thresholds remain stable across broad operating ranges. These results suggest that, in low-information thermal imagery, robust identity recovery can be achieved more effectively through high-precision trajectory relinking than through increasing tracker complexity. These results provide a controlled analysis of identity recovery in thermal video, showing that scene-level spatial-temporal consistency plays a dominant role in identity continuity compared to local frame-to-frame association.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01694
Agentic LLMs with web search change the threat model for text anonymization: weak contextual cues can become cross-referenceable evidence for re-identification, yet those same details also carry downstream analytic value of the text. Existing defenses either remove explicit identifiers, perturb text for formal privacy, or test rewritten text against non-web inference models, leaving underexplored the operating region between resistance to agentic web-search re-identification and utility retention. We introduce AURA (\textbf{A}nonymization with \textbf{U}tility-\textbf{R}etention \textbf{A}daptation), an LLM-powered \textit{mask-reconstruct} framework that decouples privacy localization from utility-preserving reconstruction and selects candidates with adversarial privacy and utility-retention checks. We evaluate AURA on real-user interview transcripts using re-identification attacks carried out by web-search agents, along with a utility evaluation based on interviewee-profile facts, codebook facts, and the joint contextual utility grid. Our results show that AURA improves the privacy-utility frontier by using adaptive privacy scope to strengthen resistance to agentic re-identification and using a mask-reconstruct anonymization method to better preserve contextual utility under fixed privacy scope.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30848