MDReID: Modality-Decoupled Learning for Any-to-Any Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification

Yingying Feng, Jie Li, Jie Hu, Yukang Zhang, Lei Tan, Jiayi Ji

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

The challenge of inconsistent modalities in real-world applications presents significant obstacles to effective object re-identification (ReID). However, most existing approaches assume modality-matched conditions, significantly limiting their effectiveness in modality-mismatched scenarios. To overcome this limitation and achieve a more flexible ReID, we introduce MDReID to allow any-to-any image-level ReID systems. MDReID is inspired by the widely recognized perspective that modality information comprises both modality-shared features, predictable across modalities, and unpredictable modality-specific features, which are inherently modality-dependent and consist of two key components: the Modality Decoupling Module (MDM) and Modality-aware Metric Learning (MML). Specifically, MDM explicitly decomposes modality features into modality-shared and modality-specific representations, enabling effective retrieval in both modality-aligned and mismatched scenarios. MML, a tailored metric learning strategy, further enhances feature discrimination and decoupling by exploiting distributional relationships between shared and specific modality features. Extensive experiments conducted on three challenging multi-modality ReID benchmarks (RGBNT201, RGBNT100, MSVR310) consistently demonstrate the superiority of MDL. MDReID achieves significant mAP improvements of 9.8\%, 3.0\%, and 11.5\% in modality-matched scenarios, and average gains of 3.4\%, 11.8\%, and 10.9\% in modality-mismatched scenarios, respectively.