Tackling Alignment Ambiguity in Person Retrieval through Conversational Attribute Mining

Abstract

Text-to-Image Person Retrieval (TIPR) aims to retrieve pedestrian images with a given natural language description. It remains highly challenging due to the inherent ambiguity in cross-modal alignment: existing models often struggle to capture fine-grained correspondences, and their understanding of detailed pedestrian attributes is typically confined to partial or coarse cues, leading to mismatched or erroneous retrieval results. To overcome this challenge, we propose CECA, a Conversation-Enhanced Cross-modal Alignment framework. CECA strengthens the attribute correspondence between textual and visual modalities through multimodal large language models (MLLMs)-guided dialogue, enhances token-level alignment via a Bidirectional Cross-attention Mixer (BCM), and stabilizes optimization with a Confidence-Aware Weighting Loss (CAWL) that reduces the impact of low-quality conversational responses. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance and strong generalization ability of our approach.