Vision-language tracking guided by natural language specifications leverages high-level semantic cues of target objects to substantially boost tracking accuracy and robustness. Existing studies have verified that adaptively optimizing textual descriptions throughout the tracking process can effectively mitigate the semantic-visual mismatch induced by dynamic variations in target appearance, position, and other inherent attributes. Nevertheless, mainstream methods that directly generate textual information via sequence models or large language models inevitably suffer from inherent defects, including erroneous target updating, excessive background distraction, and pervasive hallucination artifacts. To address the aforementioned limitations, this paper proposes a novel language dependency parsing mechanism to precisely distill core tracking principal components, encompassing target objects, semantic concepts, and background contextual information. On this basis, we perform component-aware adaptive textual description updates by exploiting the powerful cross-modal understanding capability of the pre-trained vision-language model Qwen-VL. By integrating the proposed elaborately designed modules into the baseline framework, our method achieves consistent and superior tracking performance on multiple large-scale vision-language tracking benchmarks, including TNL2K, LaSOT, TNLLT, and OTB-LANG. The source code and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/Open_VLTrack.
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.
Embodied visual tracking (EVT) requires a mobile agent to continuously follow a specific target described in natural language using only onboard vision. While recent vision-language-action (VLA) policies unify target identification and trajectory planning, their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often operates in abstract spatial latents that are difficult to supervise and weakly aligned with explicit image-space detections. To address this, we introduce ReferTrack, a referring-then-tracking paradigm that grounds EVT using a single forward-facing camera. Our model first selects the target from an indexed set of bounding boxes, then decodes tracking waypoints conditioned on this image-grounded decision. To preserve target motion cues over time, ReferTrack maintains a sliding-window queue of previously selected bounding boxes, injecting their geometric features into the visual history via temporal-viewpoint-bbox indicator (TVBI) tokens. We further enhance target identification by co-training on a custom Refer-QA dataset. On EVT-Bench, ReferTrack achieves state-of-the-art single-view performance with success rates of 89.4%, 73.3%, and 74.1% on the single-target, distracted, and ambiguity tracking splits, respectively -- matching or even surpassing several multi-camera baselines on identification-heavy tasks. Finally, real-world deployments on legged and humanoid robots validate its robust sim-to-real transfer capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/MedlarTea/referTrack.
Hyperspectral object tracking (HOT) leverages the rich spectral information provided by hyperspectral videos (HSVs), offering substantial potential for object tracking. However, efficiently extracting and exploiting spectral information from redundant spectral bands remains a fundamental challenge, which severely limits model generalization and tracking performance. Moreover, in dynamic scenes, targets often experience drastic appearance variations due to factors such as occlusion and illumination changes. These variations lead to large deformations between the current frame and the template. Such discrepancies pose major challenges for existing temporal modeling approaches. In this work, we propose VLHTrack, a novel hyperspectral vision-language (VL) joint tracking framework. Specifically, we incorporate language priors to address the fundamental challenge of spectral redundancy by designing a Language-Guided Band Selection Module (LBSM). By leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) descriptions, LBSM establishes a semantic-to-spectral mapping that mitigates redundancy and accentuates discriminative spectral features. A Multi-Modal Vision-Language Fusion Module is then employed to seamlessly integrate visual and linguistic embeddings, harnessing their complementary advantages to learn coherent cross-modal representations. To address target deformation in long-term sequences, we propose a dynamic update template feature strategy implemented via the Dynamic Template Update with Mamba (DTUM) module. By leveraging selective state space modeling, DTUM learns inter-frame dependencies to update template feature, ensuring efficient template feature evolution guided by temporal context. Experiments on HOT2023 and HOT2024 demonstrate that VLHTrack outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.