LENS: Likelihood Evaluation and Neighbor Smoothing for Attribute-Based Person Retrieval on Unseen Cameras

Nguyen Dang Duy Tan, Vo Thanh Nguyen, Linh T. T. Tran, Huynh Nguyen Phat

Attribute-based person retrieval ranks surveillance images from a binary query of semantic attributes, but mean Average Attribute Degree of Match (mADM) drops on unseen cameras as predicted probabilities shift. Common pipelines rank gallery images by their L1 distance to the query, which penalizes a confident single-attribute mismatch no more than small uncertainties across many attributes, while post-hoc recalibration fitted on source validation data fails to transfer because the per-attribute maps fitted on source data do not match those of new cameras. We propose LENS (Likelihood Evaluation and Neighbor Smoothing), combining fine-tuned DINOv3 and CLIP models with a distilled student. LENS regularizes mutually exclusive attribute groups with group cross-entropy in training, scores gallery images by the log-likelihood of the exact query, and smooths gallery logits over nearest neighbors using DINOv3 appearance features from the same forward pass. On held-out datasets, all three changes raise mADM: the likelihood score improves all six retrieval metrics for the main ensemble and mADM for all 48 development models, and training-free kNN smoothing improves all 46 tested development…