Generative Retrieval for Unsupervised Text-Based Person Search

2026-09-11

AI Summary

本文提出GTR+框架解决无监督文本基础人物搜索问题，通过两阶段生成再检索方法，并引入大规模高质量数据集LargeFine-Person。

Abstract

Text-based person search (TBPS) aims to retrieve images of a target person from a large image gallery based on a given natural language description. Most existing methods rely on supervised learning with manually annotated image-text pairs. In this paper, we explore unsupervised TBPS, with only unlabeled images. We propose GTR+, a two-stage generation-then-retrieval framework. In the generation stage, we introduce a tiered description generation framework designed to produce fine-grained and stylistically diverse textual descriptions through a three-tier sequential process. The base tier leverages an automated question-and-answer mechanism to generate basic visual attribute descriptions; the intermediate tier enhances fine-grained detail using an inter-sample contrastive mechanism; the advanced tier further enriches textual diversity via a stylized expansion mechanism. In the retrieval stage, to mitigate the impact of noisy pseudo texts, we develop an adaptive confidence-weighted retrieval learning framework. We model image-text pairs as clean or noisy using a Gaussian Mixture Model, calibrated by real-time image-text similarity and static text generation probability from the prior stage, yielding adaptive sample weights during training. Beyond that, we also contribute LargeFine-Person, a large-scale TBPS dataset with high-quality, fine-grained, and diverse textual annotations, enabling a practical and generalizable TBPS pre-training benchmark under unsupervised setting. Experiments on multiple TBPS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of both GTR+ and LargeFine-Person. Code is available at: https://github.com/Flame-Chasers/GTR.

Problem

• unsupervised text-based person search
• unlabeled images
• natural language description

Innovation

• unsupervised TBPS
• tiered description generation
• adaptive confidence-weighted retrieval
• Gaussian Mixture Model
• LargeFine-Person dataset