STORM: End-to-End Referring Multi-Object Tracking in Videos

Referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) extends tracking from category-driven perception to language-guided understanding by grounding object trajectories in natural-language expressions. Despite recent progress, existing RMOT studies are largely conducted under in-domain settings, leaving the robustness of language-conditioned tracking under inevitable visual domain shifts unexplored. In this paper, we study Cross-Domain Referring Multi-Object Tracking (CD-RMOT), a new and challenging problem that evaluates whether an RMOT model trained on a labeled source domain can reliably follow natural-language expressions in an unlabeled target domain with different visual conditions. To support systematic study, we construct CD-RMOT-Bench, a unified benchmark that combines real clear-domain referring tracking data, aligned digital-twin variants, and real adverse-domain videos. CD-RMOT-Bench enables both controlled weather/viewpoint shift analysis and realistic synthetic-real transfer evaluation under a shared RMOT protocol. Further, we provide a Query-Centric Adaptation (QCA) framework, designed to stabilize the query space that bridges visual trajectories and referring expressions. Extensive experiments reveal that domain shifts severely degrade RMOT performance, where the failure is not merely caused by object detection errors but more critically by unstable expression-conditioned temporal association and target selection. QCA establishes a strong baseline, while CD-RMOT-Bench opens a new direction for robust language-guided tracking across visual domains.

Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT) aims to track specific targets based on language descriptions, playing a vital role in interactive AI systems such as robotics and autonomous driving. However, existing RMOT methods rely exclusively on 2D RGB observations. Since similar 2D projections can correspond to different 3D configurations, the available observations may not uniquely determine the referred targets. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the task requirements and the available input. To advance research on the DRMOT task, we construct DRSet, a dataset tailored for the DRMOT task. DRSet comprises 2,076 referring expressions over 186 RGB-D source sequences. It features synchronized RGB images and depth maps paired with language descriptions, including explicit depth-dependent descriptions, to systematically evaluate spatial-semantic detection and tracking capabilities. Furthermore, we propose DRTrack, an MLLM-guided depth-referring tracking framework. DRTrack leverages a Geometric-Aware GRPO fine-tuned Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to achieve precise spatial-semantic detection from joint L+RGB+D inputs, while incorporating explicit depth cues to enforce robust trajectory association. Extensive experiments on the DRSet dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Our dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/chen-si-jia/DRMOT.

Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT) faces a fundamental structural contradiction between the high-discriminability demand and the sparse semantic supervision. This mismatch is particularly acute in highly homogeneous scenarios that require fine-grained discrimination over complex compositional semantics. However, under sparse supervision, models overfit to salient yet insufficient cues, thereby encouraging shortcut learning and semantic collapse. To resolve this, we propose COAL (Counterfactual and Observation-enhanced Alignment Learning), a framework that advances RMOT beyond isolated structural optimization through knowledge regularization. First, we introduce Explicit Semantic Injection (ESI) via a VLM to densify the observation space and enhance instance discriminability. Second, leveraging LLM reasoning, we propose Counterfactual Learning (CFL) to augment supervision, enforcing strict attribute verification for robust compositional recognition. These strategies are unified within a Hierarchical Multi-Stream Integration (HMSI) architecture, which distills external knowledge into domain-specific discriminative representations. Experiments on Refer-KITTI and Refer-KITTI-V2 benchmarks validate COAL's efficacy. Notably, it surpasses the state-of-the-art by 7.28% HOTA on the highly challenging Refer-KITTI-V2. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of knowledge regularization for resolving the sparsity-discriminability paradox in RMOT.