NFormer: Robust Person Re-identification with Neighbor Transformer

Person re-identification aims to retrieve persons in highly varying settings across different cameras and scenarios, in which robust and discriminative representation learning is crucial. Most research considers learning representations from single images, ignoring any potential interactions between them. However, due to the high intra-identity variations, ignoring such interactions typically leads to outlier features. To tackle this issue, we propose a Neighbor Transformer Network, or NFormer, which explicitly models interactions across all input images, thus suppressing outlier features and leading to more robust representations overall. As modelling interactions between enormous amount of images is a massive task with lots of distractors, NFormer introduces two novel modules, the Landmark Agent Attention, and the Reciprocal Neighbor Softmax. Specifically, the Landmark Agent Attention efficiently models the relation map between images by a low-rank factorization with a few landmarks in feature space. Moreover, the Reciprocal Neighbor Softmax achieves sparse attention to relevant -- rather than all -- neighbors only, which alleviates interference of irrelevant representations and further relieves the computational burden. In experiments on four large-scale datasets, NFormer achieves a new state-of-the-art. The code is released at \url{https://github.com/haochenheheda/NFormer}.