Bridging Gait Recognition and Large Language Models Sequence Modeling

Gait sequences exhibit sequential structures and contextual relationships similar to those in natural language, where each element—whether a word or a gait step—is connected to its predecessors and successors. This similarity enables the transformation of gait sequences into "texts" containing identity-related information. Large Language Models (LLMs), designed to understand and generate sequential data, can thus be utilized for gait sequence modeling to enhance gait recognition performance. Leveraging these insights, we make a pioneering effort to apply LLMs to gait recognition, which we refer to as GaitLLM. Specifically, we propose the Gait-to-Language (G2L) module, which converts gait sequences into a textual format suitable for LLMs, and the Language-to-Gait (L2G) module, which maps the LLM’s output back to the gait feature space, thereby bridging the gap between LLM outputs and gait recognition. Notably, GaitLLM leverages the powerful modeling capabilities of LLMs without relying on complex architectural designs, improving gait recognition performance with only a small number of trainable parameters. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on four popular gait datasets—SUSTech1K, CCPG, Gait3D, and GREW—demonstrating the effectiveness of applying LLMs in this domain. This work highlights the potential of LLMs to significantly enhance gait recognition, paving the way for future research and practical applications.