From Global to Local: Rethinking CLIP Feature Aggregation for Person Re-Identification

CLIP-based person re-identification (ReID) methods aggregate spatial features into a single global $\mathtt{\text{[CLS]}}$ token optimized for image-text alignment rather than spatial selectivity, making representations fragile under occlusion and cross-camera variation. We propose SAGA-ReID, which reconstructs identity representations by aligning intermediate patch tokens with anchor vectors parameterized in CLIP’s text embedding space – emphasizing spatially stable evidence while suppressing corrupted or absent regions, without requiring textual descriptions of individual images. Controlled experiments isolate the aggregation mechanism under two qualitatively distinct conditions – synthetic masking, where identity signal is absent, and realistic human distractors, where an overlapping person introduces semantically confusing signal – with SAGA’s advantage over global pooling growing substantially as occlusion increases across both conditions. Benchmark evaluations confirm consistent gains over CLIP-ReID across standard and occluded settings, with the largest improvements where global pooling is most unreliable: up to +10.6 Rank-1 on occluded benchmarks. SAGA’s aggregation outperforms dedicated sequential patch aggregation on a stronger backbone, confirming that structured reconstruction addresses a bottleneck that backbone quality and architectural complexity alone cannot resolve. Code available at https://github.com/ipl-uw/Structured-Anchor-Guided-Aggregation-for-ReID.