Instruct-ReID++: Towards Universal Purpose Instruction-Guided Person Re-Identification

Recently, person re-identification (ReID) has witnessed fast development due to its broad practical applications and proposed various settings, e.g., traditional ReID, clothes-changing ReID, and visible-infrared ReID. However, current studies primarily focus on single specific tasks, which limits model applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper aims to address this issue by introducing a novel instruct-ReID task that unifies 6 existing ReID tasks in one model and retrieves images based on provided visual or textual instructions. Instruct-ReID is the first exploration of a general ReID setting, where 6 existing ReID tasks can be viewed as special cases by assigning different instructions. To facilitate research in this new instruct-ReID task, we propose a large-scale OmniReID++ benchmark equipped with diverse data and comprehensive evaluation methods, e.g., task-specific and task-free evaluation settings. In the task-specific evaluation setting, gallery sets are categorized according to specific ReID tasks. We propose a novel baseline model, IRM, with an adaptive triplet loss to handle various retrieval tasks within a unified framework. For task-free evaluation setting, where target person images are retrieved from task-agnostic gallery sets, we further propose a new method called IRM++ with novel memory bank-assisted learning. Extensive evaluations of IRM and IRM++ on OmniReID++ benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 10 test sets.