Geometry-Aware Noisy Correspondence Mitigation for Cross-Modal Text-Based Person Retrieval

Text-Based Person Retrieval (TBPR) aims to accurately retrieve target individuals from large-scale image databases using only textual descriptions. Existing methods typically assume a ground-truth correspondence between text and images (i.e., strongly correlated). However, in real-world scenarios, this assumption may not be able to hold for the cross-modal matching due to weak or even corrupted correlations between textual descriptions and visual content, referred to as noisy correspondence (NC). Such NC largely disrupts the correspondence learning between visual and semantic modalities. Though prior works have improved single-modal robustness against noisy labels, systematic modeling of both cross-modal and intra-modal geometric structures in TBPR remains limited attention. In this paper, we propose Geometric Structure Consistency Alignment (GSCA) to TBPR, which leverages cross-modal cosine similarity and intra-modal nearest-neighbor affinity to learn visual-semantic consistency under noisy correspondence. To mitigate the structural corruption caused by noisy pairs, we introduce the Structure Refinement and Mining (SRAM) module. By partitioning training data into clean, ambiguous, and noisy subsets, SRAM enables the model to strategically refine the cross-modal correspondence by mining reliable pairs, thus enhancing the reliability of positive or negative samples discrimination and preserving structural consistency across modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across three public datasets. On CUHK-PEDES, it boosts Rank-1 by 1.42% in noise-free conditions, sustaining a robust 74.25% Rank-1 under a 50% noise ratio.