# Adaptive Exploration for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an Adaptive Exploration method for unsupervised person re-identification that effectively addresses domain bias by dynamically selecting neighborhoods and balancing their influence, improving accuracy across datasets.

## Contribution

The proposed method adaptively selects neighborhoods for each person image and incorporates a balance strategy, advancing unsupervised domain adaptation in person re-ID.

## Key findings

- Effective in reducing domain bias in re-ID tasks
- Improves accuracy on large-scale datasets
- Works with target-only and domain adaptive protocols

## Abstract

Due to domain bias, directly deploying a deep person re-identification (re-ID) model trained on one dataset often achieves considerably poor accuracy on another dataset. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Exploration (AE) method to address the domain-shift problem for re-ID in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, in the target domain, the re-ID model is inducted to 1) maximize distances between all person images and 2) minimize distances between similar person images. In the first case, by treating each person image as an individual class, a non-parametric classifier with a feature memory is exploited to encourage person images to move far away from each other. In the second case, according to a similarity threshold, our method adaptively selects neighborhoods for each person image in the feature space. By treating these similar person images as the same class, the non-parametric classifier forces them to stay closer. However, a problem of the adaptive selection is that, when an image has too many neighborhoods, it is more likely to attract other images as its neighborhoods. As a result, a minority of images may select a large number of neighborhoods while a majority of images have only a few neighborhoods. To address this issue, we additionally integrate a balance strategy into the adaptive selection. We evaluate our methods with two protocols. The first one is called "target-only re-ID", in which only the unlabeled target data is used for training. The second one is called "domain adaptive re-ID", in which both the source data and the target data are used during training. Experimental results on large-scale re-ID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code has been released at https://github.com/dyh127/Adaptive-Exploration-for-Unsupervised-Person-Re-Identification.