{"paper":{"title":"Not All Starting Points Are Equal: Pre-trained Priors and Their Outsized Impact on Person Identification","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Alice J. O'Toole, Matthew Q. Hill, Thomas M. Metz","submitted_at":"2025-07-23T16:04:45Z","abstract_excerpt":"Recent years have seen an explosion of diverse general purpose pre-training methodologies for computer vision. However, the impact that these pre-training methodologies have on person identification tasks (re-id) remains under-explored. We show that under equated domain adaptation pipelines, there is dramatic variance in person identification outcomes using different starting models (architectures and pre-trained weights). We show that a range of intuitive explanations for differing downstream performance on a range of re-id tests are insufficient and propose that pre-trained weights serve as "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2507.17640","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2507.17640/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}