Papers for
retail analytics teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Model improves person reidentification despite clothes changes
MINER: Modeling Inter- and Intra-Person Variance for Reidentification
Abstract: Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification (CC-ReID) remains challenging due to drastic appearance shifts across outfits. Most prior works devise biometric signal-extraction heuristics to enhance inter-person variance, e.g., using segmentation masks, while leaving intra-person variance uncontrolled. We present MINER, a simple model-agnostic framework that suppresses garment bias by contrasting hard examples and adaptively balancing dataset-dependent intra- and inter-person variance. Extensive experiments show that MINER improves retrieval across CC-ReID benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four datasets and ranking among the leaders in all three tracks of the open TVRID RGB-Depth ReID challenge.
LLM agents learn when to spend more time reasoning to improve tasks
PORA: Learning When More Reasoning Pays Off for LLM Agents
Abstract: LLM agents perform tasks over multiple steps and revise their actions based on feedback. As the total reasoning budget is often limited and must support future steps, the agent must choose between short and long reasoning before each action. Longer reasoning may improve the final task outcome by preventing later errors, but it also uses budget capacity that may be needed for future decisions. This creates two challenges: estimating the downstream value of long reasoning and deciding when that value is worth using the remaining budget. We propose Paired Outcome-guided Reasoning Allocation (PORA), which learns this decision by comparing short and long reasoning from the same interaction state. During training, \method{} completes the task twice from each selected state, once with a short reasoning allowance and once with a long allowance, and compares their final quality and total processing to estimate when longer reasoning is valuable. During inference, a controller weighs this estimate against learned prices on remaining-budget pressure and chooses either short or long reasoning without running both alternatives. We evaluate PORA across application, memory, code, retail, and mathematics tasks, achieving strong results across all settings. On BFCL memory, it exceeds the strongest existing method by 17.4--32.9 percentage points. Within the same agent, it matches or exceeds always using long reasoning on code and mathematics with 50.6% fewer actor tokens and 31.2% fewer model requests, respectively.
Confidence guided label refinement improves cross domain person identification
Confidence-Guided Pseudo-Label Refinement for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Person Re-Identification
Abstract: Unsupervised cross-domain person re-identification remains challenging because domain shifts generate noisy pseudo labels that are reinforced during iterative adaptation. Existing clustering-based methods often rely on limited reliability cues or global confidence criteria and may impose hard identity supervision on ambiguous target samples. To address these limitations, we propose CGPLR, a confidence-guided pseudo-label refinement framework for unsupervised domain-adaptive person re-identification. CGPLR estimates sample-level reliability by jointly modeling centroid compatibility, local neighborhood consistency, separation from the strongest competing cluster and temporal assignment stability. The resulting confidence distribution is used to derive cluster-adaptive upper and lower thresholds for a three-way selective decision. Reliable assignments are preserved, recoverable samples are reassigned only when an alternative cluster receives sufficient geometric and neighborhood support and highly ambiguous samples are deferred from hard identity supervision. The learning objective adapts to these decisions through confidence-weighted supervision for preserved samples, cautious corrected-label weighting for reassigned samples and label-free representation consistency for deferred samples. CGPLR achieves 76.4% Rank-1 accuracy and 47.6% mean average precision (mAP) on Market-1501 to MSMT17, and 95.1% Rank-1 accuracy and 87.7% mAP on MSMT17 to Market-1501, demonstrating effective reliability-aware selective adaptation. The code is available at https://github.com/Sundas058/CGPLR.
Diffreid improves object re-identification using discriminative diffusion model
DiffReID: Discriminative Diffusion Model for Object Re-Identification
Abstract: As a fundamental image processing task, object Re-Identification (ReID) aims to retrieve objects across non-overlapping cameras. Recently, with the development of deep learning, significant advancements have been made in object ReID. However, most existing methods suffer from generalization due to the limited size and diversity of ReID datasets. Meanwhile, current models tend to focus on extracting semantic patterns rather than learning identity-aware feature distributions. To address these issues, we propose a novel feature learning framework named \textbf{DiffReID} for object ReID. It leverages a discriminative diffusion model to gradually learn identity-aware distributions and generate identity-invariant features. More specifically, with the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, we first obtain identity-aware text features by prompt tuning. Then, we propose a Vision-guided Noise Generator (VNG) to initialize probabilistic noises and gradually corrupt identity-aware text features. Afterwards, we take visual features as conditions and propose a Light Weight Denoiser (LWD) to denoise the corrupted text features step-by-step for identity-aware distribution learning. To obtain discriminative features, we further generate identity-invariant guided features from randomly sampling visual-guided noises. Finally, we propose a Mutual Enhancement Constraint (MEC) to facilitate mutual learning between visual features and guided features to enhance the representation robustness and discrimination. Extensive experiments on five object ReID benchmarks demonstrate that our method shows better results than most state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/AWangYQ/DiffReID.
Smartphone system logs mall store visits and writes journals
AirLog: Store-Level Indoor Life Logging Made Easy
Abstract: This paper presents AirLog, a smartphone-based life journaling system that automatically reconstructs users' store visits in shopping malls and summarizes them into human-readable journals. Unlike conventional indoor localization systems, AirLog avoids labor-intensive radio-map construction and dedicated wireless localization infrastructure and algorithm calibrations. Instead, it repurposes two cues already available in commercial spaces: semantic information exposed by ambient Wi-Fi SSIDs and indoor directory images. AirLog converts directory images into spatial maps and fuses Wi-Fi semantic anchors with inertial dead reckoning to recover store-level trajectories, which are then summarized into journals by an LLM. Such store-level life logs can support applications such as personal memory recall, activity reflection, and automated diary generation without requiring users to manually record where they have been. We implement AirLog on commodity smartphones and evaluate it on both a large-scale public dataset and a self-collected dataset. The results demonstrate that AirLog substantially improves store-level region recovery, semantic matching, trajectory reconstruction, and journal quality over existing baselines. A human evaluation further shows that the generated journals are coherent and faithful to users' visits.
Canonical procedural actions create a clear system to track tool use steps
Canonical Procedural Actions: An Auditable Annotation Protocol for Tool-Use Agent Traces
Abstract: Tool-use agent traces identify messages and API calls, but procedural analyses also need explicit units of action and inspectable links to their evidence. We present Canonical Procedural Actions (CPAs), an annotation protocol that records a procedural function, its first agent-event anchor, the agent events that realize it, and separate contextual evidence. Multiple actions may share a message anchor without an inferred within-message order. A retail case study produces a versioned 24-entry codebook through open induction, recorded consolidation, and successive application audits. Two isolated LLM contexts annotate 32 trajectories disjoint from development at the trajectory level, producing 499 and 491 occurrences with anchor-label overlap A=0.982. Requiring identical context-event references reduces overlap to 0.798. These are structural repeatability measures, not semantic accuracy: 16 of 26 task IDs also occur in development, and historical tool payloads were truncated to 110 characters. Retrospective controls show that collapsing all labels raises overlap to 0.986, while simple endpoint rules reproduce the tool-anchored portion with 0.997 overlap. Assistant-message actions have 0.971 overlap, with a per-label minimum of 0.816. Applying the frozen codebook to 244 further trajectories yields 4,058 records, including eight diagnostic outcomes. The contribution is an explicit, auditable annotation instrument and a case study of its construction and measurement limits; human-reference validity and downstream utility remain to be established.
Person re-identification improves with clothing change awareness
SCORE: SubDistribution-aware Collaborative Knowledge Reinforcing for Cloth-Hybrid Lifelong Person Re-Identification
Abstract: Lifelong Person Re-Identification (LReID) aims to train a unified person retrieval model from a non-stationary data stream. Existing LReID methods mainly focus on scenarios where the clothing of each person is consistent. Recently, the Cloth-Hybrid LReID (CH-LReID) where cloth-consistent and cloth-changing data alternately occur, has emerged as a more practical and challenging scenario. Due to the conflict between clothing-relevant and clothing-irrelevant knowledge, the well-known catastrophic forgetting problem is significantly exacerbated in this task. To address this issue, we propose a SubDistribution-aware COllaborative Knowledge REinforcing (SCORE) framework, where our key idea is explicitly modeling the intra-identity diversity to continually consolidate distinct cloth-consistent and cloth-changing knowledge. Specifically, an Adaptive SubDistribution Modeling mechanism is developed, where a set of distributional subprototypes is assigned to each identity to capture the intra-identity diversity, improving the compatibility between cloth-consistent and cloth-changing knowledge. Then, a Distributional Knowledge Reinforcement scheme is introduced, where the knowledge of old distributional subprototypes is retained in the new ones by a collaborative aligning mechanism. Extensive experiments show that our SCORE achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/ECCV2026-SCORE
CrossLink links device IDs across networks to break privacy protections
CrossLink: Breaking Location Privacy by Linking Device Identifiers Across Protocols
Abstract: Smartphones simultaneously transmit temporary identifiers over LTE, WiFi, and BLE. Existing privacy defenses analyze identifier randomization per protocol, implicitly assuming that these protections compose across protocols. We show that they do not: Even when each protocol leaks only temporary identifiers and the adversary is fully passive, unsynchronized identifier rotations allow cross-protocol stitching of device traces. We present CrossLink, an uncertainty-aware tracing algorithm that links identifiers across time, space, and protocols under noisy localization and mobility. We evaluate CrossLink using controlled lab experiments with commodity devices and large-scale mobility simulation. Under large-scale mobility simulation, CrossLink reconstructs full traces for 83% of users, versus 22% for the best single-protocol baseline, showing that location privacy must be analyzed jointly across protocols. We further show that CrossLink remains effective under partial coverage: strategically placed sniffers near LTE handover regions, mobile sniffers, and limited high-coverage subregions retain sufficient cross-protocol evidence to bridge observation gaps, achieving substantially higher linkability than random deployments.