FedBPrompt: Federated Domain Generalization Person Re-Identification via Body Distribution Aware Visual Prompts
Authors: Xin Xu, Weilong Li, Wei Liu, Wenke Huang, Zhixi Yu, Bin Yang, Xiaoying Liao, Kui Jiang
Organizations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · NERC for Multimedia Software, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China · Changsha Bus Group, China · Central South University of Forestry and Technology, China · Harbin Institute of Technology Zhengzhou Research Institute, China
Federated Domain Generalization for Person Re-Identification (FedDG-ReID) learns domain-invariant representations from decentralized data. While Vision Transformer (ViT) is widely adopted, its global attention often fails to distinguish pedestrians from high similarity backgrounds or diverse viewpoints -- a challenge amplified by cross-client distribution shifts in FedDG-ReID. To address this, we propose Federated Body Distribution Aware Visual Prompt (FedBPrompt), introducing learnable visual prompts to guide Transformer attention toward pedestrian-centric regions. FedBPrompt employs a Body Distribution Aware Visual Prompts Mechanism (BAPM) comprising: Holistic Full Body Prompts to suppress cross-client background noise, and Body Part Alignment Prompts to capture fine-grained details robust to pose and viewpoint variations. To mitigate high communication costs, we design a Prompt-based Fine-Tuning Strategy (PFTS) that freezes the ViT backbone and updates only lightweight prompts, significantly reducing communication overhead while maintaining adaptability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BAPM effectively enhances feature discrimination and cross-domain generalization, while PFTS achieves notable performance gains within only a few aggregation rounds. Moreover, both BAPM and PFTS can be easily integrated into existing ViT-based FedDG-ReID frameworks, making FedBPrompt a flexible and effective solution for federated person re-identification. The code is available at https://github.com/leavlong/FedBPrompt.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: The Dual Challenges of Client Heterogeneity in Federated Person Re-ID. (a) In the FedDG-ReID setting, clients exhibit heterogeneous background and viewpoint distributions. (b) This data heterogeneity in turn leads to two critical failure modes: (Top) The model becomes easily distracted by dominant yet irrelevant backgrounds, causing false matches between different individuals. (Bottom) Diverse viewpoints severely misalign body parts of the same individual, which drastically reduces their feature similarity and results in mismatches.
Figure 2: An Overview of the Proposed FedBPrompt Framework. The framework consists of two main components. (Left) On each client, our FedBPrompt method injects learnable prompts to guide the model’s attention toward pedestrian features and away from the background. The core BAPM then learns structured, part-level representations to solve the feature misalignment problem. (Right) The framework supports two training strategies. In Full-Parameter training, the entire model (~86M) is communicated. In contrast, our proposed PFTS freezes the backbone and only communicates the lightweight prompts (~0.46M), drastically reducing communication costs while maintaining high performance.
MS+C2+C3→M
MS+C2+M→C3
C2+C3+M→MS
Average
Model
Reference
Method
mAP
rank-1
mAP
rank-1
mAP
rank-1
mAP
rank-1
FedProx [ 15 ]
MLSys 2020
official
33.4
57.6
24.0
22.4
11.2
25.3
22.9
35.1
+PFTS
37.9 ( ↑ 4.5)
61.6 ( ↑ 4.0)
28.5 ( ↑ 4.5)
27.4 ( ↑ 5.0)
15.7 ( ↑ 4.5)
36.9 ( ↑ 11.6)
27.4 ( ↑ 4.5)
42.0 ( ↑ 6.9)
+BAPM
47.3 ( ↑ 13.9)
70.9 ( ↑ 13.3)
33.7 ( ↑ 9.7)
33.7 ( ↑ 11.3)
17.7 ( ↑ 6.5)
41.2 ( ↑ 15.9)
32.9 ( ↑ 10.0)
48.6 ( ↑ 13.5)
Mixstyle [ 46 ]
ICLR 2021
official
29.3
53.3
19.6
18.6
12.4
27.9
20.4
33.3
+PFTS
34.5 ( ↑ 5.2)
58.7 ( ↑ 5.4)
23.9 ( ↑ 4.3)
22.9 ( ↑ 4.3)
17.5 ( ↑ 5.1)
40.4 ( ↑ 12.5)
25.3 ( ↑ 4.9)
40.7 ( ↑ 7.4)
Table 1: Comparison of different methods under protocol-1 . M: Market1501, C2: CUHK02, C3: CUHK03, MS: MSMT17. Average represents the average performance over three unseen domains.
M+C2+C3
M+C2+C3
M+C2+C3
→ M
→ C2
→ C3
Methods
mAP
rank-1
mAP
rank-1
mAP
rank-1
FedProx
68.7
85.1
79.9
79.3
44.6
45.6
FedProx+BAPM
72.9
88.4
83.1
83.3
49.5
50.6
FedPav
66.5
83.2
78.5
78.5
42.3
42.9
FedPav+BAPM
74.3
88.5
84.2
84.1
52.2
53.0
Table 2: Comparison of different methods on Protocol-2 . Under this protocol, we focus on the model’s identification performance on the source domains, the most basic yet often overlooked capability by existing methods.
Prompt Type
C2+C3+MS → M
C2+M+MS → C3
C2+C3+M → MS
Methods
Global
Local
mAP
rank-1
mAP
rank-1
mAP
rank-1
×
×
46.3
69.6
33.7
33.4
20.0
43.7
✓
×
48.4
73.2
36.7
36.8
22.9
48.2
×
✓
47.7
71.8
37.5
37.9
22.7
48.5
SSCU
✓
✓
49.1
73.4
37.4
38.4
23.4
49.5
×
×
39.6
64.5
32.5
33.0
13.7
30.1
Table 3: Ablation study on key components. We validate the effectiveness of different prompt types. “Global” and “Local” denote Holistic Full Body Prompts and Body Part Alignment Prompts, respectively. Their combination forms our full BAPM.
Figure 3: Attention maps on Market-1501 under severe cropping, misalignment, and occlusion. Unlike the scattered attention of the Baseline , our BAPM exhibits clear specialization: body part prompts ( Pupper , etc. ) localize specific regions, while holistic prompts ( Pfull ) capture global features. This aggregation yields comprehensive and accurate BAPM attention.
Class Token
RISE
Method
Ins. AUC
Method
Ins. AUC
SSCU
0.6160
SSCU
0.6516
+VPs
0.7103
+VPs
0.7494
BAPM
0.7559
BAPM
0.7737
Table 4: Comparison of Attention Map Types (Ins. AUC). We evaluate the fidelity of different attention map generation methods using Insertion Area Under the Curve (Ins. AUC) metric.
Figure 4: T-SNE visualizations of feature distribution on CUHK02 (C2), CUHK03 (C3), and MSMT17 (MS).
Federated domain generalization for person re-identification (FedDG-ReID) aims to collaboratively train a pedestrian retrieval model across multiple decentralized source domains such that it can generalize to unseen target environments without compromising raw data privacy. However, this task is significantly challenged by the inherent stylistic gaps across decentralized clients. Without global supervision, models easily succumb to shortcut learning where representations overfit to domain specific camera biases rather than universal identity features. We propose CO-EVO, a novel federated framework that resolves this semantic-style conflict through a co-evolutionary mechanism. On the semantic side, Camera-Invariant Semantic Anchoring (CSA) learns identity prompts with cross-camera consistency to establish purified and domain-agnostic anchors that filter out local imaging noise. On the visual side, Global Style Diversification (GSD), powered by a Global Camera-Style Bank (GCSB), synthesizes realistic perturbations to expand the visual boundaries of training data. The core of CO-EVO is its co-evolutionary loop where purified anchors act as gravitational centers to guide the image encoder toward robust anatomical attributes amidst diverse style variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CO-EVO achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, proving that the synergy between semantic purification and style expansion is essential for robust cross-domain generalization. Our code is available at: https://github.com/NanYiyuzurn/ACL-LGPS-2026.
Fengchun Zhang, Qiang Ma, Liuyu Xiang +3
School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · 2QiYuan Lab · School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications +1
The application of federated domain generalization in person re-identification (FedDG-ReID) aims to enhance the model's generalization ability in unseen domains while protecting client data privacy. However, existing mainstream methods typically rely on global feature representations and simple averaging operations for model aggregation, leading to two limitations in domain generalization: (1) Using only global features makes it difficult to capture subtle, domain-invariant local details (such as accessories or textures); (2) Uniform parameter averaging treats all clients as equivalent, ignoring their differences in robust feature extraction capabilities, thereby diluting the contributions of high quality clients. To address these issues, we propose a novel federated learning framework, Federated Aggregation via Robust and Discriminative Knowledge Selection and Integration (FedARKS), comprising two mechanisms: RK (Robust Knowledge) and KS (Knowledge Selection).
Xin Xu, Binchang Ma, Zhixi Yu +1
School of Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430065 China
Domain Generalized person Re-identification (DG Re-ID) is a challenging task, where models are trained on source domains but tested on unseen target domains. Although previous pure vision-based models have achieved significant progress, the performance remains further improved. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) present outstanding generalization capabilities in various visual applications. However, directly adapting a VLM to Re-ID shows limited generalization improvement. This is because the VLM only produces with global features that are insensitive to ID nuances. To tacle this problem, we propose a CLIP-based multi-grained vision-language alignment framework in this work. Specifically, several multi-grained prompts are introduced in language modality to describe different body parts and align with their counterparts in vision modality. To obtain fine-grained visual information, an adaptively masked multi-head self-attention module is employed to precisely extract specific part features. To train the proposed module, an MLLM-based visual grounding expert is employed to automatically generate pseudo labels of body parts for supervision. Extensive experiments conducted on both single- and multi-source generalization protocols demonstrate the superior performance of our approach. The implementation code will be released at https://github.com/RikoLi/MUVA.
Jiachen Li, Xiaojin Gong, Dongping Zhang
College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University · College of Information Engineering, China Jiliang University