# Efficient Visual Tracking with Exemplar Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09686 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09686/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04747/) (2016)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (2019)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (2018)
- [SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11703/) (2018)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Benchmark for Large-scale Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07845/) (2018)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [TransTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15460/) (2020)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [Learning Discriminative Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07220/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [MixFormerV2: Efficient Fully Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15896/) (2023)
- [Exploring Lightweight Hierarchical Vision Transformers for Efficient Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06904/) (2023)
- [Exemplar Guided Deep Neural Network for Spatial Transcriptomics Analysis of Gene Expression Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16721/) (2022)
- [Separable Self and Mixed Attention Transformers for Efficient Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03979/) (2023)
- [ZoomTrack: Target-aware Non-uniform Resizing for Efficient Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10071/) (2023)
- [Efficient Visual Tracking via Hierarchical Cross-Attention Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13537/) (2022)
- [EchoTrack: Auditory Referring Multi-Object Tracking for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18302/) (2024)
- [LiteTrack: Layer Pruning with Asynchronous Feature Extraction for Lightweight and Efficient Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09249/) (2023)
- [Two-stream Beats One-stream: Asymmetric Siamese Network for Efficient Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00516/) (2025)
- [RTracker: Recoverable Tracking via PN Tree Structured Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19242/) (2024)
- [ZippyPoint: Fast Interest Point Detection, Description, and Matching through Mixed Precision Discretization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03610/) (2022)
- [General Compression Framework for Efficient Transformer Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17564/) (2024)
- [Correlation-Embedded Transformer Tracking: A Single-Branch Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12743/) (2024)
- [Lightweight Full-Convolutional Siamese Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05392/) (2023)
- [Exploring Dynamic Transformer for Efficient Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17651/) (2024)
- [RGB-Sonar Tracking Benchmark and Spatial Cross-Attention Transformer Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07189/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Siamese Tracking with a Compact Latent Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00930/) (2023)
- [FocusTrack: A Self-Adaptive Local Sampling Algorithm for Efficient Anti-UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13604/) (2025)
- [An Experimental Study on Exploring Strong Lightweight Vision Transformers via Masked Image Modeling Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12210/) (2024)
- [BihoT: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Hyperspectral Camouflaged Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12232/) (2024)
- [Multi-step Temporal Modeling for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04363/) (2024)
- [SSF-Net: Spatial-Spectral Fusion Network with Spectral Angle Awareness for Hyperspectral Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05852/) (2024)
- [LoReTrack: Efficient and Accurate Low-Resolution Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17660/) (2024)
- [NT-VOT211: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Night-time Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20421/) (2024)
- [Improving Accuracy and Generalization for Efficient Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18855/) (2024)
- [Towards Low-Latency Event Stream-based Visual Object Tracking: A Slow-Fast Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12903/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Lightweight Hierarchical ViT and Dynamic Framework for Efficient Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20381/) (2025)
- [Track-On2: Enhancing Online Point Tracking with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19115/) (2025)
- [RELO: Reinforcement Learning to Localize for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07379/) (2026)
- [Mobile Vision Transformer-based Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05829/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The design of more complex and powerful neural network models has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in visual object tracking. These advances can be attributed to deeper networks, or the introduction of new building blocks, such as transformers. However, in the pursuit of increased tracking performance, runtime is often hindered. Furthermore, efficient tracking architectures have received surprisingly little attention. In this paper, we introduce the Exemplar Transformer, a transformer module utilizing a single instance level attention layer for realtime visual object tracking. E.T.Track, our visual tracker that incorporates Exemplar Transformer modules, runs at 47 FPS on a CPU. This is up to 8x faster than other transformer-based models. When compared to lightweight trackers that can operate in realtime on standard CPUs, E.T.Track consistently outperforms all other methods on the LaSOT, OTB-100, NFS, TrackingNet, and VOT-ST2020 datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/pblatter/ettrack.