Drift-Resilient Temporal Priors for Visual Tracking

Spatio-temporal context has become increasingly crucial for visual tracking. However, most existing approaches extract spatio-temporal cues via discrete sampling strategies, which inherently deviate from the continuity of spatio-temporal context, thereby deteriorating tracking performance. To address this challenge, we propose TLCTrack, a novel tracking framework that models token-level spatio-temporal context through continuously updated salient tokens, enabling more accurate target representation. Specifically, TLCTrack incorporates three components: Masked Unidirectional Attention (MUA), Spatial Salient Token Collection (SSTC), and Temporal Salient Token Bank (TSTB) modules. By explicitly integrating spatio-temporal context, MUA extracts discriminative targetaware spatial features in the search region. To avoid the negative impact of background on feature learning, SSTC progressively suppresses background interference, thereby enhancing target spatial representation. Finally, TSTB captures high-quality spatio-temporal information through continuous salient token updates. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art trackers. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xiading123/TLCTrack.

We revisit the memory update mechanism in SAM2-based visual object tracking and identify confidence-only mask selection as the dominant cause of drift under occlusion, rapid motion, and distractors. We introduce SENTRY, a training-free, plug-and-play, refine-before-write module that validates each memory update for short-horizon temporal consistency before committing it. SENTRY aggregates diverse segmentation hypotheses per frame, backtracks them into short tracklets, and uses neighbor-aware cycle-consistent matching against recent trajectories to favor temporally and geometrically consistent masks. It leaves the base architecture untouched, replacing confidence-driven writes with consistency-validated ones. For fair evaluation, we re-evaluate major open-source SAM2-based trackers across all available scales and datasets, filling gaps in prior reports. Integrated into five strong baselines, SENTRY delivers consistent gains across nine benchmarks, achieving new zero-shot SOTA on LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, GOT-10k, VOT20, VOT22, and DiDi. Despite these checks, the SAM2-L version runs at 32.8 FPS on an A100, and across compatible hosts adds only about 0.4--0.6 GB VRAM. Our results provide the first unified all-scale evaluation of SAM2-based trackers and show that enforcing temporal validity at write time stabilizes memory-augmented tracking without retraining. Project page: https://hamadya.github.io/SENTRY/page/

Conventional visual object trackers localize targets using handcrafted spatial priors, often in the form of heatmaps. Such priors provide only surrogate supervision and are poorly aligned with tracking optimization and evaluation metrics, such as intersection over union (IoU) and area under the success curve (AUC). Here, we introduce RELO, a REinforcement-learning-to-LOcalize method for visual object tracking that formulates target localization as a Markov decision process. Specifically, RELO replaces handcrafted spatial priors with a localization policy learned over spatial positions via reinforcement learning, with rewards combining frame-level IoU and sequence-level AUC. We additionally introduce layer-aligned temporal token propagation to improve semantic consistency across frames, with negligible computational overhead. Across multiple benchmarks, RELO achieves superior results, attaining 57.5% AUC on LaSOText without template updates. This confirms that reward-driven localization provides an effective alternative to prior-driven localization for visual object tracking.