We present Infinity, a Bitwise Visual AutoRegressive Modeling capable of generating high-resolution, photorealistic images following language instruction. Infinity refactors visual autoregressive model under a bitwise token prediction framework with an infinite-vocabulary classifier and bit-wise self-correction mechanism. By theoretically expanding the tokenizer vocabulary size to infinity in Transformer, our method significantly unleashes powerful scaling capabilities to infinity compared to vanilla VAR. Extensive experiments indicate Infinity outperforms AutoRegressive Text-to-Image models by large margins, matches or surpasses leading diffusion models. Without extra optimization, Infinity generates a 1024×1024 image in 0.8s, 2.6× faster than SD3-Medium, making it the fastest Text-to-Image model. All the code and models are available to promote further exploration of Infinity for visual generation.

We introduce InfinityStar, a unified spacetime autoregressive framework for high-resolution image and dynamic video synthesis. Building on the recent success of autoregressive modeling in both vision and language, our purely discrete approach jointly captures spatial and temporal dependencies within a single architecture. This unified design naturally supports a variety of generation tasks such as text-to-image, text-to-video, image-to-video, and long-duration video synthesis via straightforward temporal autoregression. Through extensive experiments, InfinityStar scores 83.74 on VBench, outperforming all autoregressive models by large margins, even surpassing diffusion competitors like HunyuanVideo. Without extra optimizations, our model generates a 5s, 720p video approximately 10$\times$ faster than leading diffusion-based methods. To our knowledge, InfinityStar is the first discrete autoregressive video generator capable of producing industrial-level 720p videos. We release all code and models to foster further research in efficient, high-quality video generation.

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) aims to detect and associate all desired objects across frames. Most methods accomplish the task by explicitly or implicitly leveraging strong cues (i.e., spatial and appearance information), which exhibit powerful instance-level discrimination. However, when object occlusion and clustering occur, spatial and appearance information will become ambiguous simultaneously due to the high overlap among objects. In this paper, we demonstrate this long-standing challenge in MOT can be efficiently and effectively resolved by incorporating weak cues to compensate for strong cues. Along with velocity direction, we introduce the confidence and height state as potential weak cues. With superior performance, our method still maintains Simple, Online and Real-Time (SORT) characteristics. Also, our method shows strong generalization for diverse trackers and scenarios in a plug-and-play and training-free manner. Significant and consistent improvements are observed when applying our method to 5 different representative trackers. Further, with both strong and weak cues, our method Hybrid-SORT achieves superior performance on diverse benchmarks, including MOT17, MOT20, and especially DanceTrack where interaction and severe occlusion frequently happen with complex motions. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ymzis69/HybridSORT.

All instance perception tasks aim at finding certain objects specified by some queries such as category names, language expressions, and target annotations, but this complete field has been split into multiple independent sub-tasks. In this work, we present a universal instance perception model of the next generation, termed UNINEXT. UNINEXT reformulates diverse instance perception tasks into a unified object discovery and retrieval paradigm and can flexibly perceive different types of objects by simply changing the input prompts. This unified formulation brings the following benefits: (1) enormous data from different tasks and label vocabularies can be exploited for jointly training general instance-level representations, which is especially beneficial for tasks lacking in training data. (2) the unified model is parameter-efficient and can save redundant computation when handling multiple tasks simultaneously. UNINEXT shows superior performance on 20 challenging benchmarks from 10 instance-level tasks including classical image-level tasks (object detection and instance segmentation), vision-and-language tasks (referring expression comprehension and segmentation), and six video-level object tracking tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/MasterBin-IIAU/UNINEXT.

The reference-based object segmentation tasks, namely referring image segmentation (RIS), referring video object segmentation (RVOS), and video object segmentation (VOS), aim to segment a specific object by utilizing either language or annotated masks as references. Despite significant progress in each respective field, current methods are task-specifically designed and developed in different directions, which hinders the activation of multi-task capabilities for these tasks. In this work, we end the current fragmented situation and propose UniRef to unify the three reference-based object segmentation tasks with a single architecture. At the heart of our approach is the multiway-fusion for handling different task with respect to their specified references. And a unified Transformer architecture is then adopted for performing instance-level segmentation. With the unified designs, UniRef can be jointly trained on a broad range of benchmarks and can flexibly perform multiple tasks at runtime by specifying the corresponding references. We evaluate the jointly trained network on various benchmarks. Extensive experimental results indicate that our proposed UniRef achieves state-of-the-art performance on RIS and RVOS, and performs competitively on VOS with a single network.

Open-world instance segmentation is a rising task, which aims to segment all objects in the image by learning from a limited number of base-category objects. This task is challenging, as the number of unseen categories could be hundreds of times larger than that of seen categories. Recently, the DETR-like models have been extensively studied in the closed world while stay unexplored in the open world. In this paper, we utilize the Transformer for open-world instance segmentation and present SWORD. Firstly, we introduce to attach the stop-gradient operation before classification head and further add IoU heads for discovering novel objects. We demonstrate that a simple stop-gradient operation not only prevents the novel objects from being suppressed as background, but also allows the network to enjoy the merit of heuristic label assignment. Secondly, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework to enlarge the representations between objects and background. Specifically, we maintain a universal object queue to obtain the object center, and dynamically select positive and negative samples from the object queries for contrastive learning. While the previous works only focus on pursuing average recall and neglect average precision, we show the prominence of SWORD by giving consideration to both criteria. Our models achieve state-of-the-art performance in various open-world cross-category and cross-dataset generalizations. Particularly, in VOC to non-VOC setup, our method sets new state-of-the-art results of 40.0% on ${\text{AR}}_{100}^{\text{b}}$ and 34.9% on ${\text{AR}}_{100}^{\text{m}}$. For COCO to UVO generalization, SWORD significantly outperforms the previous best open-world model by 5.9% on APmand 8.1% on ${\text{AR}}_{100}^{\text{m}}$.

Correlation has a critical role in the tracking field, especially in recent popular Siamese-based trackers. The correlation operation is a simple fusion method that considers the similarity between the template and the search region. However, the correlation operation is a local linear matching process, losing semantic information and easily falling into a local optimum, which may be the bottleneck in designing high-accuracy tracking algorithms. In this work, to determine whether a better feature fusion method exists than correlation, a novel attention-based feature fusion network, inspired by the transformer, is presented. This network effectively combines the template and search region features using attention mechanism. Specifically, the proposed method includes an ego-context augment module based on self-attention and a cross-feature augment module based on cross-attention. First, we present a transformer tracking (named TransT) method based on the Siamese-like feature extraction backbone, the designed attention-based fusion mechanism, and the classification and regression heads. Based on the TransT baseline, we also design a segmentation branch to generate the accurate mask. Finally, we propose a stronger version of TransT by extending it with a multi-template scheme and an IoU prediction head, named TransT-M. Experiments show that our TransT and TransT-M methods achieve promising results on seven popular benchmarks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenxin-dlut/TransT-M.

Compared with short-term tracking, long-term tracking remains a challenging task that usually requires the tracking algorithm to track targets within a local region and re-detect targets over the entire image. However, few works have been done and their performances have also been limited. In this paper, we present a novel robust and real-time long-term tracking framework based on the proposed local search module and re-detection module. The local search module consists of an effective bounding box regressor to generate a series of candidate proposals and a target verifier to infer the optimal candidate with its confidence score. For local search, we design a long short-term updated scheme to improve the target verifier. The verification capability of the tracker can be improved by using several templates updated at different times. Based on the verification scores, our tracker determines whether the tracked object is present or absent and then chooses the tracking strategies of local or global search, respectively, in the next frame. For global re-detection, we develop a novel re-detection module that can estimate the target position and target size for a given base tracker. We conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate that this module can be flexibly integrated into many other tracking algorithms for long-term tracking and that it can improve long-term tracking performance effectively. Numerous experiments and discussions are conducted on several popular tracking datasets, including VOT, OxUvA, TLP, and LaSOT. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker achieves satisfactory performance with a real-time speed. Code is available at https://github.com/difhnp/ELGLT.

Correlation acts as a critical role in the tracking field, especially in recent popular Siamese-based trackers. The correlation operation is a simple fusion manner to consider the similarity between the template and the search region. However, the correlation operation itself is a local linear matching process, leading to lose semantic information and fall into local optimum easily, which may be the bottleneck of designing high-accuracy tracking algorithms. Is there any better feature fusion method than correlation? To address this issue, inspired by Transformer, this work presents a novel attention-based feature fusion network, which effectively combines the template and search region features solely using attention. Specifically, the proposed method includes an ego-context augment module based on self-attention and a cross-feature augment module based on cross-attention. Finally, we present a Transformer tracking (named TransT) method based on the Siamese-like feature extraction backbone, the designed attention-based fusion mechanism, and the classification and regression head. Experiments show that our TransT achieves very promising results on six challenging datasets, especially on large-scale LaSOT, TrackingNet, and GOT-10k benchmarks. Our tracker runs at approximatively 50 fps on GPU. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenxin-dlut/TransT.

Object tracking has achieved significant progress over the past few years. However, state-of-the-art trackers become increasingly heavy and expensive, which limits their deployments in resource-constrained applications. In this work, we present LightTrack, which uses neural architecture search (NAS) to design more lightweight and efficient object trackers. Comprehensive experiments show that our LightTrack is effective. It can find trackers that achieve superior performance compared to handcrafted SOTA trackers, such as SiamRPN++ [30] and Ocean [56], while using much fewer model Flops and parameters. Moreover, when deployed on resource-constrained mobile chipsets, the discovered trackers run much faster. For example, on Snapdragon 845 Adreno GPU, LightTrack runs 12× faster than Ocean, while using 13× fewer parameters and 38× fewer Flops. Such improvements might narrow the gap between academic models and industrial deployments in object tracking task. LightTrack is released at here.

Visual object tracking aims to precisely estimate the bounding box for the given target, which is a challenging problem due to factors such as deformation and occlusion. Many recent trackers adopt the multiple-stage strategy to improve bounding box estimation. These methods first coarsely locate the target and then refine the initial prediction in the following stages. However, existing approaches still suffer from limited precision, and the coupling of different stages severely restricts the method’s transferability. This work proposes a novel, flexible, and accurate refinement module called Alpha-Refine (AR), which can significantly improve the base trackers’ box estimation quality. By exploring a series of design options, we conclude that the key to successful refinement is extracting and maintaining detailed spatial information as much as possible. Following this principle, Alpha-Refine adopts a pixel-wise correlation, a corner prediction head, and an auxiliary mask head as the core components. Comprehensive experiments on TrackingNet, LaSOT, GOT-10K, and VOT2020 benchmarks with multiple base trackers show that our approach significantly improves the base tracker’s performance with little extra latency. The proposed Alpha-Refine method leads to a series of strengthened trackers, among which the ARSiamRPN (AR strengthened SiamRPNpp) and the ARDiMP50 (AR strengthened DiMP50) achieve good efficiency-precision trade-off, while the ARDiMPsuper (AR strengthened DiMPsuper) achieves very competitive performance at a realtime speed. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/MasterBin-IIAU/AlphaRefine.

In this paper, we present a new tracking architecture with an encoder-decoder transformer as the key component. The encoder models the global spatio-temporal feature dependencies between target objects and search regions, while the decoder learns a query embedding to predict the spatial positions of the target objects. Our method casts object tracking as a direct bounding box prediction problem, without using any proposals or predefined anchors. With the encoder-decoder transformer, the prediction of objects just uses a simple fully-convolutional network, which estimates the corners of objects directly. The whole method is end-to-end, does not need any postprocessing steps such as cosine window and bounding box smoothing, thus largely simplifying existing tracking pipelines. The proposed tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging short-term and long-term benchmarks, while running at real-time speed, being 6× faster than Siam R-CNN [54]. Code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/researchmm/Stark.

Adversarial attack of CNN aims at deceiving models to misbehave by adding imperceptible perturbations to images. This feature facilitates to understand neural networks deeply and to improve the robustness of deep learning models. Although several works have focused on attacking image classifiers and object detectors, an effective and efficient method for attacking single object trackers of any target in a model-free way remains lacking. In this paper, a cooling-shrinking attack method is proposed to deceive state-of-the-art SiameseRPN-based trackers. An effective and efficient perturbation generator is trained with a carefully designed adversarial loss, which can simultaneously cool hot regions where the target exists on the heatmaps and force the predicted bounding box to shrink, making the tracked target invisible to trackers. Numerous experiments on OTB100, VOT2018, and LaSOT datasets show that our method can effectively fool the state-of-the-art SiameseRPN++ tracker by adding small perturbations to the template or the search regions. Besides, our method has good transferability and is able to deceive other top-performance trackers such as DaSiamRPN, DaSiamRPN-UpdateNet, and DiMP. The source codes are available at https://github.com/MasterBin-IIAU/CSA.

Compared with traditional short-term tracking, long-term tracking poses more challenges and is much closer to realistic applications. However, few works have been done and their performance have also been limited. In this work, we present a novel robust and real-time long-term tracking framework based on the proposed skimming and perusal modules. The perusal module consists of an effective bounding box regressor to generate a series of candidate proposals and a robust target verifier to infer the optimal candidate with its confidence score. Based on this score, our tracker determines whether the tracked object being present or absent, and then chooses the tracking strategies of local search or global search respectively in the next frame. To speed up the image-wide global search, a novel skimming module is designed to efficiently choose the most possible regions from a large number of sliding windows. Numerous experimental results on the VOT-2018 long-term and OxUvA long-term benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best performance and runs in real-time. The source codes are available at https://github.com/iiau-tracker/SPLT.