Vision-language object tracking integrates advanced linguistic information, enhancing its robustness and accuracy in complex scenarios. Nevertheless, current methods are constrained by a lack of sufficient vision-language data, making it challenging for the model to learn generalized knowledge. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new prompt-based framework for vision-language tracking, named ProVLT. This framework casts language information as a prompt for pretrained visionbased tracking models, thereby leveraging the knowledge from extensive tracking data. Experiments demonstrate that ProVLT achieves competitive performance while training only a fraction of parameters (approximately 29% of modal parameters). For instance, ProVLT achieves competitive performance, attaining AUC of 59.8% on TNL2K benchmark. Furthermore, we augment five mainstream vision-only tracking benchmarks with language annotations, and find that the inclusion of linguistic information consistently improves tracking performance. On these benchmarks, the linguistic information improves the performance by an average of 2.9% compared with the vision-based tracker. We will release the code, models, and benchmarks for the community.

Practical deployments, especially on resource-limited edge devices, necessitate high speed for visual object trackers. To meet this demand, we introduce a new efficient tracker with a Two-Stream architecture, named ToS. While the recent one-stream tracking framework, employing a unified backbone for simultaneous processing of both the template and search region, has demonstrated exceptional efficacy, we find the conventional two-stream tracking framework, which employs two separate backbones for the template and search region, offers inherent advantages. The two-stream tracking framework is more compatible with advanced lightweight backbones and can efficiently utilize benefits from large templates. We demonstrate that the two-stream setup can exceed the one-stream tracking model in both speed and accuracy through strategic designs. Our methodology rejuvenates the two-stream tracking paradigm with lightweight pre-trained backbones and the proposed three efficient strategies: 1) A feature-aggregation module that improves the representation capability of the backbone, 2) A channel-wise approach for feature fusion, presenting a more effective and lighter alternative to spatial concatenation techniques, and 3) An expanded template strategy to boost tracking accuracy with negligible additional computational cost. Extensive evaluations across multiple tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method sets a new state-of-the-art performance in efficient visual tracking.