DKC: Differentiated Knowledge Consolidation for Cloth-Hybrid Lifelong Person Re-identification

Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) aims to match the same person using sequentially collected data. However, due to the long-term nature of lifelong learning, the inevitable changes in human clothes prevent the model from relying on unified discriminative information (e.g., clothing style) to match the same person in the streaming data, demanding differentiated cloth-irrelevant information. Unfortunately, existing LReID methods typically fail to leverage such knowledge resulting in the exacerbation of catastrophic forgetting issues. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on a challenging practical task called Cloth-Hybrid Lifelong Person Re-identification (CH-LReID), which requires matching the same person wearing different clothes using sequentially collected data. A Differentiated Knowledge Consolidation (DKC) framework is designed to unify and balance distinct knowledge across streaming data. The core idea is to adaptively balance differentiated knowledge and compatibly consolidate cloth-relevant and cloth-irrelevant information. To this end, a Differentiated Knowledge Transfer (DKT) module and a Latent Knowledge Consolidation (LKC) module are designed to adaptively discover differentiated new knowledge, while eliminating the derived domain shift of old knowledge via reconstructing the old latent feature space, respectively. Then, to further alleviate the catastrophic conflict between differentiated new and old knowledge, we further propose a Dual-level Distribution Alignment (DDA) module to align the distribution of discriminative knowledge at both the instance level and the fine-grained level. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method against existing methods in both CH-LReID and traditional LReID tasks. Our code will be released soon.