Prototype Matters: Modality-unified Prototype Self-distillation for Unsupervised Visible-infrared Person Re-identification — Paper

Abstract

Estimating reliable cross-modality association is crucial to unsupervised visible-infrared person re-ID. While optimal transport is shown to be a practical solution for cross-modality association, it suffers from the rigidness of hard label assignment without considering the impact of cluster noise. Moreover, enforcing only cross-modality contrast is also suboptimal, as it fails to jointly optimize the similarity relation within and across modality. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for cross-modality learning by well exploitation of prototypes: First, instead of contrasting with cross-modality prototypes, we show that modality-unified prototypical contrast facilitates better modality invariance by jointly and simultaneously optimizing similarity relation within and across-modality. Taking self-prototype as a steady teacher, we further refine the instance-prototype online relation through prototype-guided self-distillation. The two components are optimized in a unified framework, leading to a simple yet effective model. On standard VI-ReID benchmarks, we perform extensive comparison and analysis, validating the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/Terminator8758/PoSeD.

Authors 2

Menglin Wang, Xiaojin Gong

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Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.11514
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: new
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.11514
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CV
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.11514
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CV
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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Authors: Menglin Wang, Xiaojin Gong

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
Menglin Wang, Xiaojin Gong	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperPrototype Matters: Modality-unified Prototype Self-distillation for Unsupervised Visible-infrared Person Re-identification
New paper: Prototype Matters: Modality-unified Prototype Self-distillation for Unsupervised Visible-infrared Person Re-identification
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arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CV	feed	T1· Official	2 h ago	1

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