ReasoningTrack: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Long-term Vision-Language Tracking
This addresses the challenge of accurately tracking objects specified by text in videos, which is important for applications like surveillance and robotics, though it builds incrementally on existing vision-language models.
The paper tackles the problem of vision-language tracking by proposing ReasoningTrack, a framework that uses chain-of-thought reasoning to generate updated language descriptions during tracking, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks with a new dataset of 200 video sequences.
Vision-language tracking has received increasing attention in recent years, as textual information can effectively address the inflexibility and inaccuracy associated with specifying the target object to be tracked. Existing works either directly fuse the fixed language with vision features or simply modify using attention, however, their performance is still limited. Recently, some researchers have explored using text generation to adapt to the variations in the target during tracking, however, these works fail to provide insights into the model's reasoning process and do not fully leverage the advantages of large models, which further limits their overall performance. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a novel reasoning-based vision-language tracking framework, named ReasoningTrack, based on a pre-trained vision-language model Qwen2.5-VL. Both SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) and reinforcement learning GRPO are used for the optimization of reasoning and language generation. We embed the updated language descriptions and feed them into a unified tracking backbone network together with vision features. Then, we adopt a tracking head to predict the specific location of the target object. In addition, we propose a large-scale long-term vision-language tracking benchmark dataset, termed TNLLT, which contains 200 video sequences. 20 baseline visual trackers are re-trained and evaluated on this dataset, which builds a solid foundation for the vision-language visual tracking task. Extensive experiments on multiple vision-language tracking benchmark datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed reasoning-based natural language generation strategy. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/Open_VLTrack