Incentive Noise and Structural Prior Infusion for Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification

Multi-modal object Re-Identification (ReID) benefits from complementary information across heterogeneous imaging modalities. To further enrich semantic representation, text descriptions have recently been incorporated as an additional modality. However, recent visionlanguage approaches often treat text descriptions as clean, deterministic signals and overlook their inherent noise, including modality-mismatched phrases and semantically ambiguous expressions. Moreover, prevailing methods lack explicit mechanisms to reconcile fine-grained structural discrepancies between modalities, even after high-level semantic alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework centered on Positive-Incentive Noise (π-noise) and structured prompt modulation. First, the Semantic Cross-Modal Modulator harnesses task-aware π-noise, sampled from a distribution conditioned on both visual and text inputs, to perturb global tokens and enable semantics-guided crossmodal compensation. Second, the Structure-Aware Prompt Adapter injects learnable geometric priors via prompts to enhance spatial consistency. Third, the Context-Aware Sparse Fusion module distills structural context to guide adaptive fusion while shielding identity features from noisy local details. Experiments on three multi-modal ReID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/zw-absin/INSPI.