From Visual to Multimodal: Systematic Ablation of Encoders and Fusion Strategies in Animal Identification

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kudryavtsev, Vasiliy, Borodin, Kirill, Berezin, German, Bubenchikov, Kirill, Mkrtchian, Grach, Ryzhkov, Alexander
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Kudryavtsev, Vasiliy
Borodin, Kirill
Berezin, German
Bubenchikov, Kirill
Mkrtchian, Grach
Ryzhkov, Alexander
author_facet Kudryavtsev, Vasiliy
Borodin, Kirill
Berezin, German
Bubenchikov, Kirill
Mkrtchian, Grach
Ryzhkov, Alexander
contents Automated animal identification is a practical task for reuniting lost pets with their owners, yet current systems often struggle due to limited dataset scale and reliance on unimodal visual cues. This study introduces a multimodal verification framework that enhances visual features with semantic identity priors derived from synthetic textual descriptions. We constructed a massive training corpus of 1.9 million photographs covering 695,091~unique animals to support this investigation. Through systematic ablation studies, we identified SigLIP2-Giant and E5-Small-v2 as the optimal vision and text backbones. We further evaluated fusion strategies ranging from simple concatenation to adaptive gating to determine the best method for integrating these modalities. Our proposed approach utilizes a gated fusion mechanism and achieved a Top-1 accuracy of 84.28\% and an Equal Error Rate of 0.0422 on a comprehensive test protocol. These results represent an 11\% improvement over leading unimodal baselines and demonstrate that integrating synthesized semantic descriptions significantly refines decision boundaries in large-scale pet re-identification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02270
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Visual to Multimodal: Systematic Ablation of Encoders and Fusion Strategies in Animal Identification
Kudryavtsev, Vasiliy
Borodin, Kirill
Berezin, German
Bubenchikov, Kirill
Mkrtchian, Grach
Ryzhkov, Alexander
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Automated animal identification is a practical task for reuniting lost pets with their owners, yet current systems often struggle due to limited dataset scale and reliance on unimodal visual cues. This study introduces a multimodal verification framework that enhances visual features with semantic identity priors derived from synthetic textual descriptions. We constructed a massive training corpus of 1.9 million photographs covering 695,091~unique animals to support this investigation. Through systematic ablation studies, we identified SigLIP2-Giant and E5-Small-v2 as the optimal vision and text backbones. We further evaluated fusion strategies ranging from simple concatenation to adaptive gating to determine the best method for integrating these modalities. Our proposed approach utilizes a gated fusion mechanism and achieved a Top-1 accuracy of 84.28\% and an Equal Error Rate of 0.0422 on a comprehensive test protocol. These results represent an 11\% improvement over leading unimodal baselines and demonstrate that integrating synthesized semantic descriptions significantly refines decision boundaries in large-scale pet re-identification.
title From Visual to Multimodal: Systematic Ablation of Encoders and Fusion Strategies in Animal Identification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02270