Seeing the Overlooked: Bio-Visual Inspired Weak Saliency Feedback Transformer for Person Re-identification

摘要

The domain gap between pretraining data (e.g., ImageNet, LUPerson) and downstream ReID datasets often leads to suboptimal performance when directly fine-tuning pretrained models. While existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by incorporating additional modalities (e.g., text, 3D data) or visual cues (e.g., pose, body masks), these approaches introduce two key limitations: (1) they may distract the model with irrelevant factors like background clutter or clothing variations, and (2) they inevitably increase computational overhead during inference. To address these issues, we propose the Weak Saliency Feedback Transformer (WSFFormer), inspired by the feedback mechanisms in biological visual systems. Unlike traditional one-way feature propagation, WSFFormer employs an adaptive feedback loop during training to enhance low-response regions, enabling the model to capture richer and more discriminative features. The WSFFormer introduces three key components: (1) The Lateral Feedback Module (LFM) mimics retinal lateral inhibition by adaptively suppressing high-response regions and amplifying weak discriminative features, forcing attention on subtle details; (2) The Progressive Feedback Module (PFM) refines feedback through deep-to-shallow closed-loop propagation, blending high-level semantics with spatial details; (3) The Feedback Sensitive Entropy Loss (FSE Loss) optimizes target-domain adaptation by quantifying divergence between forward and feedback-corrected features. Experiments on holistic/occluded ReID benchmarks show WSFFormer outperforms ViT/Swin-based SOTA methods without extra inference cost.