Distilling the Past: Information-Dense and Style-Aware Replay for Lifelong Person Re-Identification

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Mingyu, Jiang, Wei, Liu, Haojie, Li, Zhiyong, Wu, Q. M. Jonathan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912964005593088
author Wang, Mingyu
Jiang, Wei
Liu, Haojie
Li, Zhiyong
Wu, Q. M. Jonathan
author_facet Wang, Mingyu
Jiang, Wei
Liu, Haojie
Li, Zhiyong
Wu, Q. M. Jonathan
contents Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) aims to continuously adapt to new domains while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. While replay-based methods effectively alleviate forgetting, they are constrained by strict memory budgets, leading to limited sample diversity. Conversely, exemplar-free approaches bypass memory constraints entirely but struggle to preserve the fine-grained identity semantics crucial for Re-ID tasks. To resolve this fundamental dilemma, we propose an Information-Dense and Style-Aware Replay framework. Instead of storing a sparse set of raw historical images, we fuse the knowledge of sequential data into the pixel space of a compact replay buffer via multi-stage gradient matching and identity supervision. This condensation process not only maximizes the semantic representativeness of limited memory but also naturally conceals original visual details, inherently preserving data privacy. Furthermore, to combat forgetting induced by cross-domain shifts, we introduce a dual-alignment style replay strategy that adapts both current and fused replay samples, harmonizing feature representations across disparate domains. Extensive experiments on multiple LReID benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving improvements of +5.0% and +6.0% in Seen-Avg mAP over current state-of-the-art and traditional replay-based methods, respectively, thereby establishing an efficient and robust new baseline for lifelong learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distilling the Past: Information-Dense and Style-Aware Replay for Lifelong Person Re-Identification
Wang, Mingyu
Jiang, Wei
Liu, Haojie
Li, Zhiyong
Wu, Q. M. Jonathan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) aims to continuously adapt to new domains while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. While replay-based methods effectively alleviate forgetting, they are constrained by strict memory budgets, leading to limited sample diversity. Conversely, exemplar-free approaches bypass memory constraints entirely but struggle to preserve the fine-grained identity semantics crucial for Re-ID tasks. To resolve this fundamental dilemma, we propose an Information-Dense and Style-Aware Replay framework. Instead of storing a sparse set of raw historical images, we fuse the knowledge of sequential data into the pixel space of a compact replay buffer via multi-stage gradient matching and identity supervision. This condensation process not only maximizes the semantic representativeness of limited memory but also naturally conceals original visual details, inherently preserving data privacy. Furthermore, to combat forgetting induced by cross-domain shifts, we introduce a dual-alignment style replay strategy that adapts both current and fused replay samples, harmonizing feature representations across disparate domains. Extensive experiments on multiple LReID benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving improvements of +5.0% and +6.0% in Seen-Avg mAP over current state-of-the-art and traditional replay-based methods, respectively, thereby establishing an efficient and robust new baseline for lifelong learning.
title Distilling the Past: Information-Dense and Style-Aware Replay for Lifelong Person Re-Identification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01587