P-SRM: Selective Recovery of Rejected Predictions in Visual Tracking

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.

Modern Visual Place Recognition (VPR) methods excel on standard benchmarks yet remain brittle in feature-poor environments. By treating each query image in isolation, they discard the sequential context in any real trajectory. We formalize a task that exploits this context: given a query sequence, localize the final image against an unordered reference database -- which, unlike sequence-to-sequence methods, requires no sequential structure in the database. We propose TRAIL (TRajectory-Aware Image Localization), a principled framework based on Conditional Random Fields (CRF) that combines learned functions for visual similarity and for camera-motion consistency, refining a distribution over candidate references as each query arrives. A lightweight post-processing layer atop any pre-trained VPR backbone, TRAIL improves a state-of-the-art baseline by up to 8.3 percentage points on our primary benchmark, transfers to unseen datasets without retraining, and delivers its largest gains where visual cues are scarce.

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/