Building a unified target representation that simultaneously achieves short-term adaptability and long-term stability is crucial for robust visual tracking. However, existing trackers typically face an inherent trade-off. Methods primarily relying on short-term appearance and motion cues achieve rapid adaptation, but they often struggle with long-term identity consistency. Conversely, trackers that emphasize extensive temporal context provide strong robustness, yet this approach can compromise their short-term adaptability. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel tracker, MUTrack, which comprehensively integrates both long-term and short-term memories into a unified target representation for more robust tracking. Specifically, we design a unified memory bank that stores and manages long-term memory for maintaining long-term identity consistency, and short-term memory for adapting to instantaneous appearance changes. To fully leverage the complementary nature of both long-term and short-term temporal information, we introduce a perception interaction module that dynamically fuses these memory types through deep and bidirectional interactions, enabling mutual refinement where one guides the other. This ultimately generates a highly adaptive target representation, which effectively balances adaptability to instantaneous changes with robustness against long-term identity drift. Extensive experiments on GOT10k, TrackingNet, LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, NfS, and OTB100 consistently demonstrate that MUTrack achieves SOTA performance.

Transformer-based pretrained models have advanced Visual Grounding (VG) significantly, but their scaling up has caused soaring training and inference costs. While efforts adapting Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning to VG have cut training expenses to some extent, inference costs are over-looked, stemming from Transformer’s computation costs growing quadratically with input token length. To address the above challenge, we propose a text-guided token prune method based on a one-stream architecture for VG, named OneSVG. Specifically, OneSVG transfers low-rank adaptation LoRA to VG, and calculates the relevance between each vision token and text semantics in multiple stages, and gradually prunes the vision tokens with low relevance. In addition, traditional VG methods use a single [REG] token to predict bounding boxes, and the [REG] token relies on complete vision tokens during training, pruning large number of vision tokens will disrupt the spatial orientation information of images. Therefore, the prediction head in OneSVG first restores the square structure of images by padding the missing area, and then accepts complete vision tokens. Experimental results on three widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that our OneSVG achieves state-of-the-art real-time speed while maintaining the best accuracy with only 34.3% tokens. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/ltShi/OneSVG.

Recently, visual prompt tuning is introduced to RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) tracking as a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) method. However, these PEFT-based RGB-T tracking methods typically rely solely on spatial domain information as prompts for feature extraction. As a result, they often fail to achieve optimal performance by overlooking the crucial role of frequency-domain information in prompt learning. To address this issue, we propose an efficient Visual Fourier Prompt Tracking (named VFPTrack) method to learn modality-related prompts via Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Our method consists of symmetric feature extraction encoder with shared parameters, visual-fourier prompts, and Modality Fusion Prompt Generator that generates bidirectional interaction prompts through multi-modal feature fusion. Specifically, we first use a frozen feature extraction encoder to extract RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) modality features. Then, we combine the visual prompts in the spatial domain with the frequency domain prompts obtained from the FFT, which allows for the full extraction and understanding of modality features from different domain information. Finally, unlike previous fusion methods, the modality fusion prompt generation module we use combines features from different modalities to generate a fused modality prompt. This modality prompt is interacted with each individual modality to fully enable feature interaction across different modalities. Extensive experiments conducted on three popular RGB-T tracking benchmarks show that our method demonstrates outstanding performance.

How to make a good trade-off between performance and computational cost is crucial for a tracker. However, current famous methods typically focus on complicated and time-consuming learning that combining temporal and appearance information by input more and more images (or features). Consequently, these methods not only increase the model's computational source and learning burden but also introduce much useless and potentially interfering information. To alleviate the above issues, we propose a simple yet robust tracker that separates temporal information learning from appearance modeling and extracts temporal relations from a set of representative tokens rather than several images (or features). Specifically, we introduce one track token for each frame to collect the target's appearance information in the backbone. Then, we design a mamba-based Temporal Module for track tokens to be aware of context by interacting with other track tokens within a sliding window. This module consists of a mamba layer with autoregressive characteristic and a cross-attention layer with strong global perception ability, ensuring sufficient interaction for track tokens to perceive the appearance changes and movement trends of the target. Finally, track tokens serve as a guidance to adjust the appearance feature for the final prediction in the head. Experiments show our method is effective and achieves competitive performance on multiple benchmarks at a real-time speed.

The success of visual tracking has been largely driven by datasets with manual box annotations. However, these box annotations require tremendous human effort, limiting the scale and diversity of existing tracking datasets. In this work, we present a novel Self-Supervised Tracking framework, named SSTrack, designed to eliminate the need of box annotations. Specifically, a decoupled spatio-temporal consistency training framework is proposed to learn rich target information across timestamps through global spatial localization and local temporal association. This allows for the simulation of appearance and motion variations of instances in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, an instance contrastive loss is designed to learn instance-level correspondences from a multi-view perspective, offering robust instance supervision without additional labels. This new design paradigm enables SSTrack to effectively learn generic tracking representations in a self-supervised manner, while reducing reliance on extensive box annotations. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that SSTrack surpasses SOTA self-supervised tracking methods, achieving an improvement of more than 25.3%, 20.4%, and 14.8% in AUC (AO) score on the GOT10K, LaSOT, TrackingNet datasets, respectively.

Vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a popular backbone for visual tracking. However, complete ViT architectures are too cumbersome to deploy for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking which extremely emphasizes efficiency. In this study, we discover that many layers within lightweight ViT-based trackers tend to learn relatively redundant and repetitive target representations. Based on this observation, we propose a similarity-guided layer adaptation approach to optimize the structure of ViTs. Our approach dynamically disables a large number of representation-similar layers and selectively retains only a single optimal layer among them, aiming to achieve a better accuracy-speed trade-off. By incorporating this approach into existing ViTs, we tailor previously complete ViT architectures into an efficient similarity-guided layer-adaptive framework, namely SGLATrack, for real-time UAV tracking. Extensive experiments on six tracking benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and show that our SGLATrack achieves a state-of-the-art real-time speed while maintaining competitive tracking precision. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/SGLATrack.

With the assistance of language descriptions, Visual-Language (VL) object tracking can obtain more accurate semantic information compared to traditional Visual-Only object tracking. However, the ability of current VL trackers to obtain target semantic information has not been fully developed due to limitations such as wasted modeling capabilities and insufficient utilization of historical temporal information. On the one hand, the modeling output from Transformer shallow encoders often does not directly participate in the prediction of tracking results, resulting in a certain degree of model capability waste. On the other hand, the semantic information of historical tracking results has also not been fully utilized in the tracking process, resulting in a certain degree of lack of semantic assistance capability. Therefore, we propose a novel hierarchical multi-stage VL tracker called SIEVL-Track to enhance target semantic information. Specifically, we first design a multi-stage visual language tracking framework for modeling multi-scale semantic information in Visual-Language tracking pipeline. Secondly, we propose a selective deep and shallow semantic information fusion module (S-DSFM) that explicitly integrates shallow output features into deep output features, so to reduce the waste of modeling capabilities and obtain more high-frequency semantic information related to the target. Finally, we design a temporal cue modeling module based on linguistic classification and multi-frame historical information(MHLS-TCM), with the aim of more comprehensive utilization of historical temporal semantic information. Benefit from the above designs, our VL tracker can obtain stronger target semantic information. Competitive performance from extensive experimental results on five popular vision-language tracking benchmarks, including LaSOT, OTB99-Lang, WebUAV-3M, LaSOText and TNL2K, have demonstrated the superiority and effectiveness of our SIEVL-Track.

The introduction of natural language for vision-language (VL) tracking has been proven to improve performance. However, natural language remains under-explored in existing aerial trackers. Moreover, existing VL trackers ignore the misalignment of language with dynamic target states, which is prominent in complex UAV scenarios. In this work, we present AVLTrack, a flexible framework for aerial vision-language tracking. It consists of three key components, a dynamic sparse learning (DSL) module, an efficient Transformer backbone, and a multi-level language perception (MLP) strategy. First, DSL sparsely connects language and images via dynamic sparse attention, providing accurate multi-modal prompts. To adapt to target state variations, the sparsity in DSL is dynamically adjusted based on semantic information, flexibly highlighting target-specific tokens. Next, the Transformer backbone follows highly parallelized one-stream architectures, allowing efficient multi-modal feature extraction and interaction. Finally, MLP enables the iterative interaction of language and visual information, aiming to utilize language priori to guide the generation of discriminative visual features. Moreover, we construct the DTB70-NLP dataset to facilitate UAV vision-language tracking. Extensive experiments on WebUAV-3M and DTB70-NLP demonstrate the leading performance of AVLTrack compared to existing outstanding trackers while maintaining a high running speed of 80.5 FPS. The dataset and codes are available athttps://github.com/xyl-507/AVLTrack.

The features provided by RGB and Thermal Infrared (TIR) images have their own characteristics. Therefore, how to adaptively fuse multi-modal features according to different tracking scenarios is crucial for RGB-T tracking. However, current mainstream RGB-T tracking algorithms often use fixed fusion operations for modal interaction in different scenarios. Consequently, their tracking permanence is deteriorated due to they are unable to dynamically adjust the fused multi-modal features based on the current scenes. To address this issue, we propose a novel RGB-T tracking algorithm called AETrack, which can dynamically extract effective modal features in different scenarios for adaptive fusion. Firstly, we design an adaptive expert decision mechanism that employs multiple experts to process the input features. Each expert focuses on and learns different relevant features. Based on this mechanism, we then propose a feature-guided method that leverages the correlations between modalities to provide cross-modal information. This guidance enables the adaptive expert mechanism to adaptively select the most suitable expert to output effective features based on different scenarios, ensuring that our proposed AETrack prioritizes effective features and thus alleviates interference from irrelevant information. Finally, we design a Progressive Cross-modal Fusion operation to achieve multi-level adaptive fusion of effective features across different modalities. Benefiting from this adaptive fusion process, we can effectively achieve multi-modal interaction in different scenarios to guide robust tracking. Extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks (i.e., LasHeR, RGBT210, RGBT234) show that our proposed AETrack can significantly improve tracking performance.

How to learn multi-scale and multi-level representations is crucial for robust tracking. However, most current one-stream structure based trackers with visual transformers (dubbed ViTs) cannot effectively capture multi-scale representations due to the structure of their adopted ViTs is non-hierarchical. Meanwhile, they often only use the output features from the final layer for predicting results (i.e., ignoring the utilization of low-level features from the shallow layers) which may result in a certain degree of lacking multi-level representation learning ability. To address these issues, we propose a robust multi-stage tracker that effectively combines the advantages of both hierarchical and one-stream structured ViT as a tracking backbone to improve the multi-scale and multi-level representation learning abilities. Specifically, first of all, we design a hierarchical tracker with a three-stage backbone. In the first two stages of our tracker, we utilize a dual-branch structure to obtain multi-scale features of the template and search region separately. Especially, We design the local scale awareness modules based on simple MLP layers to capture multi-scale features. These modules remove complex operations such as convolutions or shifted window attentions, thus avoiding the performance degradation caused by traditional hierarchical ViTs. In the third stage (i.e. the main stage), we construct a global encoder based on the one-stream ViT to achieve efficient feature extraction and feature interaction for our tracker. Then, we design a multi-level feature integration module in the main stage to explicitly utilize the representation information learned from the shallow layers and fuse them with the features of the final layer to obtain multi-level representation information. Lastly, benefit from the these designs, our tracker can effectively capture more multi-scale and multi-level representations for robust tracking. Comprehensive experiments on GOT-10k, LaSOT, LaSOT$_{ext}$, TNL2K, UAV123, TrackingNet and VOT2020 benchmarks validate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

How to effectively exploit spatio-temporal information is crucial to capture target appearance changes in visual tracking. However, most deep learning-based trackers mainly focus on designing a complicated appearance model or template updating strategy, while lacking the exploitation of context between consecutive frames and thus entailing the when-and-how-to-update dilemma. To address these issues, we propose a novel explicit visual prompts framework for visual tracking, dubbed EVPTrack. Specifically, we utilize spatio-temporal tokens to propagate information between consecutive frames without focusing on updating templates. As a result, we cannot only alleviate the challenge of when-to-update, but also avoid the hyper-parameters associated with updating strategies. Then, we utilize the spatio-temporal tokens to generate explicit visual prompts that facilitate inference in the current frame. The prompts are fed into a transformer encoder together with the image tokens without additional processing. Consequently, the efficiency of our model is improved by avoiding how-to-update. In addition, we consider multi-scale information as explicit visual prompts, providing multiscale template features to enhance the EVPTrack's ability to handle target scale changes. Extensive experimental results on six benchmarks (i.e., LaSOT, LaSOText, GOT-10k, UAV123, TrackingNet, and TNL2K.) validate that our EVPTrack can achieve competitive performance at a real-time speed by effectively exploiting both spatio-temporal and multi-scale information. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/EVPTrack.

Recent RGBD trackers have employed cueing techniques by overlaying Depth modality images as cues onto RGB modality images, which are then fed into the RGB-based model for tracking. However, the direct overlaying interaction method between modalities not only introduces more noise into the feature space but also exhibits the inadaptability of the RGB-based model to mixed-modality inputs. To address these issues, we introduce Visual Adapt for RGBD Tracking (VADT). Specifically, we maintain the input of the RGB-based model as the RGB modality. Additionally, we have devised a fusion module to enable modality interaction between depth and RGB features. Subsequently, a Depth Adapt module has been formulated to facilitate image interaction with the fused features. This module involves cross-attending to the obtained depth-assisted features and the RGB search frame features produced by the RGB-based model’s output. Experimental results indicate that our proposed tracker achieves state-of-the-art results on various RGBD benchmark tests.

Recently, RGB-T tracking methods have made significant progress, demonstrating remarkable capabilities in addressing the complexities of tracking tasks within demanding environments. However, these methods overlook instability of modal validity in real-world scenarios. This limits the model’s ability to understand the correlation between modalities, thereby hindering the model’s ability to fully leverage the synergistic effects of RGB and TIR. To address this challenge, we propose a novel RGB-T tracking model named MCTrack, from the perspective of leveraging correlation among modalities. First, during the feature extraction stage, we design a novel module based on channel matching modeling to construct bidirectional channel context information flow for two modalities. By leveraging information flow, specific modalities correlation information can be transmitted to two modes, augmenting the correlation between the two modes adaptively. Subsequently, after the feature extraction network, the features of each modality are decoded and transformed to generate more correlated feature representations. During this stage, we extract distinctive and collective features by leveraging the correlation among modalities. Then fusing these features and generated search region features specifically for localization. This aids the model in comprehending the correlation between RGB and TIR under complex scenarios, thereby enhancing its ability to capture and utilize key features. Based on extensive experiments conducted on four popular RGB-T tracking benchmarks, our model demonstrates superior performance, particularly showcasing impressive results on the LasHeR dataset with an achieved Precision of 71.6%.

Transformer has achieved impressive progress in visual tracking due to their capability of global modeling, which enables them to learn low-frequency features(i.e., high-level semantic information). However, it seems to overlook the high-frequency features(i.e., low-level texture and edge information) which are crucial to identify different intra-class object instances in the tracking task. To address this issue, we propose a transformer based tracker via frequency fusion perspective that investigated whether high-frequency and low-frequency features can be effectively combined to achieve robust tracking. Specifically, we design a simple yet effective two-stage fusion strategy and use an appropriate frequency fusion strategy in tracking process of each stage so as to make full use of frequency domain information. In the feature extraction stage, we use wavelet decomposition of high-frequency subbands to solve the performance loss caused by the transformer’s catastrophic forgetting of high-frequency information. In the prediction head stage, we use a variety of wavelet decomposition subbands to model the multi-frequency information. The two-stage fusion strategy makes our model extract more balanced and beneficial multi-frequency information, enabling it to effectively capture target texture information and local edge information while also being sensitive to global information. Extensive experiments on six challenging benchmarks (i.e., LaSOT$_{ext}$, UAV123, TNL2K, LaSOT, TrackingNet, and GOT-10k) demonstrates the superior performance of our tracker.

Transformer attention plays an important role in current top-performing trackers. However, it is bottom-up, driven by stimulus and lacks intrinsic prior guidance. This bottom-up attention mechanism leads to an emphasis on all objects in the input images, rather than the task related objects. As a result, the performance of the bottom-up attention based trackers is deteriorated in complicated scenes. To address this issue, we propose a robust tracker that combines bottom-up attention with top-down attention to comply with the existing ViT framework, named TBTrack. TBTrack can not only utilize the existing bottom-up attention mechanisms to model the long-range relationship of input tokens, but also utilize a newly added top-down attention mechanism to pay more attention to task related object and further eliminate interference from similar objects and backgrounds. Specifically, we firstly design a top-down prior generation module using an adaptive learning parameter combined with the template inputs to obtain top-down task guided signals. Then, we inject the prior signals into a bottom-up attention module to obtain a top-down and bottom-up attention combination block (TB-Block). Finally, we stack these TB-Blocks to construct our tracker (TBTrack) with top-down prior guidance capability, which focuses more on the task related object. Through extensive experiments, our TBTrack achieves impressive performance on multiple tracking benchmarks, including GOT-10k, LaSOT, LaSOText, TNL2K, TrackingNet, UAV123 and so on. The code and trained models will be publicly available.

Based on the fixed language descriptions in the initial frames, a vision-language tracker typically adopts a two-stream model structure to align vision and language features at the feature fusion stages. However, this paradigm may degrade the tracking performance due to inaccurate language descriptions and lacks further modal interaction. To address these issues, we propose a one-stream vision-language model called One-stream Stepwise Decreasing for Vision-Language Tracking (OSDT). Specifically, we first encode the language description using a language encoder. The obtained language features are then combined with visual images and entered jointly into a visual encoder, in which the encoder’s self-attention mechanism is utilized to facilitate more interactions between language and visual features. Moreover, to mitigate the problems caused by inaccurate language descriptions, we design a stepwise decreasing multi-modal interaction framework, in which a Feature Filter Module (FFM) is introduced to select language features that are more relevant to visual information to provide semantic guidance for visual feature extraction. Furthermore, without additional feature fusion modules, our one-stream model framework can efficiently utilize the proposed feature filtering module for feature selection. Consequently, our tracker can achieve fast tracking speed in the vision-language tracking domain compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. We extensively evaluate our tracker on three benchmarks, i.e. TNL2K, LaSOT, and OTB99, demonstrating competing performance compared to state-of-the-art vision-language tracking methods.

The finetuning paradigm has been a widely used methodology for the supervised training of top-performing trackers. However, the finetuning paradigm faces one key issue: it is unclear how best to perform the finetuning method to adapt a pretrained model to tracking tasks while alleviating the catastrophic forgetting problem. To address this problem, we propose a novel partial finetuning paradigm for visual tracking via unifying pretrain-finetuning and visual prompt tuning (named UPVPT), which can not only efficiently learn knowledge from the tracking task but also reuse the prior knowledge learned by the pre-trained model for effectively handling various challenges in tracking task. Firstly, to maintain the pre-trained prior knowledge, we design a Prompt-style method to freeze some parameters of the pretrained network. Then, to learn knowledge from the tracking task, we update the parameters of the prompt and MLP layers. As a result, we cannot only retain useful prior knowledge of the pre-trained model by freezing the backbone network but also effectively learn target domain knowledge by updating the Prompt and MLP layer. Furthermore, the proposed UPVPT can easily be embedded into existing Transformer trackers (e.g., OSTracker and SwinTracker) by adding only a small number of model parameters (less than 1% of a Backbone network). Extensive experiments on five tracking benchmarks (i.e., UAV123, GOT-10k, LaSOT, TNL2K, and TrackingNet) demonstrate that the proposed UPVPT can improve the robustness and effectiveness of the model, especially in complex scenarios.