# All in One: Exploring Unified Vision-Language Tracking with Multi-Modal Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03373 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03373/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05442/) (2023)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (2018)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Single-Model and Any-Modality for Video Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15851/) (2023)
- [Autogenic Language Embedding for Coherent Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20730/) (2024)
- [WebUOT-1M: Advancing Deep Underwater Object Tracking with A Million-Scale Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19818/) (2024)
- [ATCTrack: Aligning Target-Context Cues with Dynamic Target States for Robust Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19875/) (2025)
- [Beyond Visual Cues: Synchronously Exploring Target-Centric Semantics for Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17085/) (2023)
- [ReasoningTrack: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Long-term Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05221/) (2025)
- [MEDBind: Unifying Language and Multimodal Medical Data Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12894/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Vision-Language Tracking by Effectively Converting Textual Cues into Visual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19648/) (2024)
- [SEAM: Semantically Equivalent Across Modalities Benchmark for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18179/) (2025)
- [Underwater Camouflaged Object Tracking Meets Vision-Language SAM2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16902/) (2024)
- [MambaTrack: Exploiting Dual-Enhancement for Night UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15761/) (2024)
- [Text as Any-Modality for Zero-Shot Classification by Consistent Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06382/) (2025)
- [VPTracker: Global Vision-Language Tracking via Visual Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22799/) (2025)
- [COST: Contrastive One-Stage Transformer for Vision-Language Small Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01321/) (2025)
- [DALR: Dual-level Alignment Learning for Multimodal Sentence Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21096/) (2025)
- [Omni Survey for Multimodality Analysis in Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13000/) (2025)
- [RAGTrack: Language-aware RGBT Tracking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03617/) (2026)
- [4DVLT: Dynamic Scene Understanding with Worldline-Centered Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22631/) (2026)
- [Towards General Multimodal Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11218/) (2025)
- [How Far are Modern Trackers from UAV-Anti-UAV? A Million-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07385/) (2025)
- [GLAD: Generative Language-Assisted Visual Tracking for Low-Semantic Templates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00570/) (2026)
- [Learning to Track Instance from Single Nature Language Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07064/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Aware Temporal Adaptation for UAV Anti-UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26511/) (2026)
- [SOI is the Root of All Evil: Quantifying and Breaking Similar Object Interference in Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09524/) (2025)
- [Interactive Tracking: A Human-in-the-Loop Paradigm with Memory-Augmented Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01974/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language Guided Hyperspectral Object Tracking via Semantics Fusion and Contextual Template Updating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09167/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Parsing and Updating Natural Language Specification using VLMs for Robust Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29357/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current mainstream vision-language (VL) tracking framework consists of three parts, ie a visual feature extractor, a language feature extractor, and a fusion model. To pursue better performance, a natural modus operandi for VL tracking is employing customized and heavier unimodal encoders, and multi-modal fusion models. Albeit effective, existing VL trackers separate feature extraction and feature integration, resulting in extracted features that lack semantic guidance and have limited target-aware capability in complex scenarios, eg similar distractors and extreme illumination. In this work, inspired by the recent success of exploring foundation models with unified architecture for both natural language and computer vision tasks, we propose an All-in-One framework, which learns joint feature extraction and interaction by adopting a unified transformer backbone. Specifically, we mix raw vision and language signals to generate language-injected vision tokens, which we then concatenate before feeding into the unified backbone architecture. This approach achieves feature integration in a unified backbone, removing the need for carefully-designed fusion modules and resulting in a more effective and efficient VL tracking framework. To further improve the learning efficiency, we introduce a multi-modal alignment module based on cross-modal and intra-modal contrastive objectives, providing more reasonable representations for the unified All-in-One transformer backbone. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks, ie OTB99-L, TNL2K, LaSOT, LaSOTrm Ext and WebUAV-3M, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed tracker against existing state-of-the-arts on VL tracking. Codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/983632847/All-in-One.