Reliability Exploration with Self-Ensemble Learning for Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) based on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer the pre-trained model from one labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Existing methods tackle this problem by using clustering methods to generate pseudo labels. However, pseudo labels produced by these techniques may be unstable and noisy, substantially deteriorating models' performance. In this paper, we propose a Reliability Exploration with Self-ensemble Learning (RESL) framework for domain adaptive person Re-ID. First, to increase the feature diversity, multiple branches are presented to extract features from different data augmentations. Taking the temporally average model as a mean teacher model, online label refining is conducted by using its dynamic ensemble predictions from different branches as soft labels. Second, to combat the adverse effects of unreliable samples in clusters, sample reliability is estimated by evaluating the consistency of different clusters' results, followed by selecting reliable instances for training and re-weighting sample contribution within Re-ID losses. A contrastive loss is also utilized with cluster-level memory features which are updated by the mean feature. The experiments demonstrate that our method can significantly surpass the state-of-the-art performance on the unsupervised domain adaptive person Re-ID.