Shuxiang Song

Hongtao Yang, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang et al.

Given the real-time demands of UAV tracking, many methods simplify the backbone to reduce computation, but this often weakens feature representation and degrades performance in complex scenarios. To alleviate this issue, we propose EATrack, an efficient and asymmetric UAV tracking framework centered around a teacher-guided dual-branch distillation strategy that enhances the feature expressiveness of the lightweight student model. Specifically, EATrack investigates two complementary perspectives of knowledge transfer: spatially focused feature-level distillation that compensates for weakened representations by guiding the student to learn strong target representations, and prediction-level distillation that enhances spatial localization by learning the teacher's capability for accurate target localization. Furthermore, to enhance robustness against appearance variations, we introduce a fine-grained target-aware distillation strategy that selectively transfers the teacher's target modeling capacity to the student. A temporal adaptation module is incorporated at inference to enhance robustness over time. Experiments on five UAV benchmarks demonstrate that EATrack achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and speed. Code: https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/EATrack

Weijing Wu, Qihua Liang, Bineng Zhong et al.

Refining visual representations by eliminating their internal feature-level redundancy is crucial for simultaneously optimizing the performance and computational cost of models in visual tracking. To enhance their performance, many contemporary Transformer-based trackers leverage a larger number of historical template frames to capture richer spatio-temporal cues. However, this strategy leads to a massive number of input visual tokens. This creates two critical issues: it imposes a quadratic computational burden and can also degrade the tracker's overall performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a compress-then-interact tracking framework, ETCTrack, that learns to efficiently compress template tokens from historical template frames into a robust target representation, moving beyond handcrafted rules. Our method first employs the Adaptive Token Compressor to dynamically construct compact yet highly discriminative template tokens by filtering out redundant visual tokens. These refined template tokens are then processed by our Hierarchical Interaction Encoder to achieve a deep, adaptive interaction with the search features. Refined search features ensure subsequent precise target localization. Experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers. ETCTrack-B224 reduces the number of template tokens by 60%, leading to a 21.4% reduction in MACs with only a 0.4% drop in accuracy. The source code are available at https://github.com/PJD-WJ/ETCTrack.

Chaocan Xue, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang et al.

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.

Yaozong Zheng, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang et al.

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 \textbf{\tracker}, 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 {\tracker} 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 {\tracker} surpasses \textit{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. Code: https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/SSTrack.

Jinxia Xie, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang et al.

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. Code and trained models will be available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/TemTrack.

Xiaohai Li, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang et al.

The consistency between the semantic information provided by the multi-modal reference and the tracked object is crucial for visual-language (VL) tracking. However, existing VL tracking frameworks rely on static multi-modal references to locate dynamic objects, which can lead to semantic discrepancies and reduce the robustness of the tracker. To address this issue, we propose a novel vision-language tracking framework, named DUTrack, which captures the latest state of the target by dynamically updating multi-modal references to maintain consistency. Specifically, we introduce a Dynamic Language Update Module, which leverages a large language model to generate dynamic language descriptions for the object based on visual features and object category information. Then, we design a Dynamic Template Capture Module, which captures the regions in the image that highly match the dynamic language descriptions. Furthermore, to ensure the efficiency of description generation, we design an update strategy that assesses changes in target displacement, scale, and other factors to decide on updates. Finally, the dynamic template and language descriptions that record the latest state of the target are used to update the multi-modal references, providing more accurate reference information for subsequent inference and enhancing the robustness of the tracker. DUTrack achieves new state-of-the-art performance on four mainstream vision-language and two vision-only tracking benchmarks, including LaSOT, LaSOT$_{\rm{ext}}$, TNL2K, OTB99-Lang, GOT-10K, and UAV123. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/DUTrack.

Fansheng Zeng, Bineng Zhong, Haiying Xia et al.

Contextual reasoning with constraints is crucial for enhancing temporal consistency in cross-frame modeling for visual tracking. However, mainstream tracking algorithms typically associate context by merely stacking historical information without explicitly supervising the association process, making it difficult to effectively model the target's evolving dynamics. To alleviate this problem, we propose RSTrack, which explicitly models and supervises context reasoning via three core mechanisms. \textit{1) Context Reasoning Mechanism}: Constructs a target state reasoning pipeline, converting unconstrained contextual associations into a temporal reasoning process that predicts the current representation based on historical target states, thereby enhancing temporal consistency. \textit{2) Forward Supervision Strategy}: Utilizes true target features as anchors to constrain the reasoning pipeline, guiding the predicted output toward the true target distribution and suppressing drift in the context reasoning process. \textit{3) Efficient State Modeling}: Employs a compression-reconstruction mechanism to extract the core features of the target, removing redundant information across frames and preventing ineffective contextual associations. These three mechanisms collaborate to effectively alleviate the issue of contextual association divergence in traditional temporal modeling. Experimental results show that RSTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmark datasets while maintaining real-time running speeds. Our code is available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/RSTrack.

Jinxia Xie, Bineng Zhong, Zhiyi Mo et al.

The rich spatio-temporal information is crucial to capture the complicated target appearance variations in visual tracking. However, most top-performing tracking algorithms rely on many hand-crafted components for spatio-temporal information aggregation. Consequently, the spatio-temporal information is far away from being fully explored. To alleviate this issue, we propose an adaptive tracker with spatio-temporal transformers (named AQATrack), which adopts simple autoregressive queries to effectively learn spatio-temporal information without many hand-designed components. Firstly, we introduce a set of learnable and autoregressive queries to capture the instantaneous target appearance changes in a sliding window fashion. Then, we design a novel attention mechanism for the interaction of existing queries to generate a new query in current frame. Finally, based on the initial target template and learnt autoregressive queries, a spatio-temporal information fusion module (STM) is designed for spatiotemporal formation aggregation to locate a target object. Benefiting from the STM, we can effectively combine the static appearance and instantaneous changes to guide robust tracking. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves the tracker's performance on six popular tracking benchmarks: LaSOT, LaSOText, TrackingNet, GOT-10k, TNL2K, and UAV123.

Yaozong Zheng, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang et al.

How to achieve vision-language (VL) tracking using natural language descriptions from a video sequence \textbf{without relying on any bounding-box ground truth}? In this work, we achieve this goal by tackling \textit{self-supervised VL tracking}, which aims to evaluate tracking capabilities guided by natural language descriptions. We introduce \textbf{\tracker}, a novel self-supervised VL tracker that is capable of tracking any referred object by a language description. Unlike traditional methods that equally fuse all language and visual tokens, we propose an efficient Dynamic Token Aggregation Module, which treats each visual token \textbf{unequally}. The module consists of three main steps: i) Based on an anchor token, it selects multiple important target tokens from the template frame. ii) The selected target tokens are merged according to their attention scores and aggregated into the language tokens, thereby eliminating redundant visual token noise and enhancing semantic alignment. iii) Finally, the fused language tokens serve as guiding signals to extract potential target tokens from the search frame and propagate them to subsequent frames, enhancing temporal prompts and encouraging the tracker to autonomously learn instance tracking from unlabeled videos. This new modeling approach enables the effective self-supervised learning of language-guided tracking representations without the need for large-scale bounding box annotations. Extensive experiments on VL tracking benchmarks show that {\tracker} surpasses SOTA self-supervised methods.

Yaozong Zheng, Qihua Liang, Bineng Zhong et al.

Learning robust contextual knowledge from unlabeled videos is essential for advancing self-supervised tracking. However, conventional self-supervised trackers lack effective context modeling, while existing context association methods based on non-semantic queries struggle to adapt to unlabeled tracking scenarios, making it difficult to learn reliable contextual cues. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised tracking framework, named \textbf{\tracker}, which introduces a dual-modal context association mechanism that jointly leverages fine-grained semantic prompts and contextual noise to drive the model toward learning robust tracking representations. Adherent to the easy-to-hard learning principle, our contextual association mechanism operates based on two stages. During early training, instance patch tokens (prompts) are assigned to both forward and backward tracking branches to facilitate the acquisition of tracking knowledge. As training progresses, contextual noise is gradually injected into the model to perturb feature, encouraging the tracker to learn robust tracking representations in a more complex feature space. Thus, this novel contextual association mechanism enables our self-supervised model to learn high-quality tracking representations from unlabeled videos, while being applied exclusively during training to preserve efficient inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Xiaohai Li, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang et al.

Effectively constructing context information with long-term dependencies from video sequences is crucial for object tracking. However, the context length constructed by existing work is limited, only considering object information from adjacent frames or video clips, leading to insufficient utilization of contextual information. To address this issue, we propose MambaLCT, which constructs and utilizes target variation cues from the first frame to the current frame for robust tracking. First, a novel unidirectional Context Mamba module is designed to scan frame features along the temporal dimension, gathering target change cues throughout the entire sequence. Specifically, target-related information in frame features is compressed into a hidden state space through selective scanning mechanism. The target information across the entire video is continuously aggregated into target variation cues. Next, we inject the target change cues into the attention mechanism, providing temporal information for modeling the relationship between the template and search frames. The advantage of MambaLCT is its ability to continuously extend the length of the context, capturing complete target change cues, which enhances the stability and robustness of the tracker. Extensive experiments show that long-term context information enhances the model's ability to perceive targets in complex scenarios. MambaLCT achieves new SOTA performance on six benchmarks while maintaining real-time running speeds.

Haiying Xia, Zhongyi Huang, Yumei Tan et al.

Music emotion recognition is a key task in symbolic music understanding (SMER). Recent approaches have shown promising results by fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained models (e.g., MIDIBERT, a benchmark in symbolic music understanding) to map musical semantics to emotional labels. While these models effectively capture distributional musical semantics, they often overlook tonal structures, particularly musical modes, which play a critical role in emotional perception according to music psychology. In this paper, we investigate the representational capacity of MIDIBERT and identify its limitations in capturing mode-emotion associations. To address this issue, we propose a Mode-Guided Enhancement (MoGE) strategy that incorporates psychological insights on mode into the model. Specifically, we first conduct a mode augmentation analysis, which reveals that MIDIBERT fails to effectively encode emotion-mode correlations. We then identify the least emotion-relevant layer within MIDIBERT and introduce a Mode-guided Feature-wise linear modulation injection (MoFi) framework to inject explicit mode features, thereby enhancing the model's capability in emotional representation and inference. Extensive experiments on the EMOPIA and VGMIDI datasets demonstrate that our mode injection strategy significantly improves SMER performance, achieving accuracies of 75.2% and 59.1%, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of mode-guided modeling in symbolic music emotion recognition.

Chenlong Xu, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang et al.

Recently, several studies have shown that utilizing contextual information to perceive target states is crucial for object tracking. They typically capture context by incorporating multiple video frames. However, these naive frame-context methods fail to consider the importance of each patch within a reference frame, making them susceptible to noise and redundant tokens, which deteriorates tracking performance. To address this challenge, we propose a new token context-aware tracking pipeline named LMTrack, designed to automatically learn high-quality reference tokens for efficient visual tracking. Embracing the principle of Less is More, the core idea of LMTrack is to analyze the importance distribution of all reference tokens, where important tokens are collected, continually attended to, and updated. Specifically, a novel Token Context Memory module is designed to dynamically collect high-quality spatio-temporal information of a target in an autoregressive manner, eliminating redundant background tokens from the reference frames. Furthermore, an effective Unidirectional Token Attention mechanism is designed to establish dependencies between reference tokens and search frame, enabling robust cross-frame association and target localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our tracker, achieving state-of-the-art results on tracking benchmarks such as GOT-10K, TrackingNet, and LaSOT.