What Makes You Unique? Attribute Prompt Composition for Object Re-Identification

Object Re-IDentification (ReID) aims to recognize individuals across non-overlapping camera views. While recent advances have achieved remarkable progress, most existing models are constrained to either single-domain or cross-domain scenarios, limiting their real-world applicability. Single-domain models tend to overfit to domain-specific features, whereas cross-domain models often rely on diverse normalization strategies that may inadvertently suppress identity-specific discriminative cues. To address these limitations, we propose an Attribute Prompt Composition (APC) framework, which exploits textual semantics to jointly enhance discrimination and generalization. Specifically, we design an Attribute Prompt Generator (APG) consisting of a Semantic Attribute Dictionary (SAD) and a Prompt Composition Module (PCM). SAD is an over-complete attribute dictionary to provide rich semantic descriptions, while PCM adaptively composes relevant attributes from SAD to generate discriminative attribute-aware features. In addition, motivated by the strong generalization ability of Vision-Language Models (VLM), we propose a Fast–Slow Training Strategy (FSTS) to balance ReID-specific discrimination and generalizable representation learning. Specifically, FSTS adopts a Fast Update Stream (FUS) to rapidly acquire ReID-specific discriminative knowledge and a Slow Update Stream (SUS) to retain the generalizable knowledge inherited from the pre-trained VLM. Through a mutual interaction, the framework effectively focuses on ReID-relevant features while mitigating overfitting. Extensive experiments on both conventional and Domain Generalized (DG) ReID datasets demonstrate that our framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods, exhibiting superior performances in terms of both discrimination and generalization. The source code is available at https://github.com/AWangYQ/APC.