# Unified Single-Stage Transformer Network for Efficient RGB-T Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13764 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13764/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (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)
- [Learning Discriminative Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07220/) (2019)
- [TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10794/) (2018)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [RGB-T Object Tracking:Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08982/) (2018)
- [Backbone is All Your Need: A Simplified Architecture for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05328/) (2022)
- [Visible-Thermal UAV Tracking: A Large-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04120/) (2022)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion for End-to-End RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11714/) (2019)
- [Challenge-Aware RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13143/) (2020)
- [Jointly Modeling Motion and Appearance Cues for Robust RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02041/) (2020)
- [Dense Feature Aggregation and Pruning for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10451/) (2019)
- [Real-Time MDNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08834/) (2018)
- [Duality-Gated Mutual Condition Network for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07188/) (2020)
- [RGBT Tracking via Multi-Adapter Network with Hierarchical Divergence Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07189/) (2020)
- [MFGNet: Dynamic Modality-Aware Filter Generation for RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10433/) (2021)
- [M5L: Multi-Modal Multi-Margin Metric Learning for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07650/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [MambaVT: Spatio-Temporal Contextual Modeling for robust RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07889/) (2024)
- [CADTrack: Learning Contextual Aggregation with Deformable Alignment for Robust RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17967/) (2025)
- [Omni Survey for Multimodality Analysis in Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13000/) (2025)
- [Middle Fusion and Multi-Stage, Multi-Form Prompts for Robust RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18193/) (2024)
- [LightFC-X: Lightweight Convolutional Tracker for RGB-X Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18143/) (2025)
- [Parameter-Dynamic Adaptive Fusion and Calibration Network for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01807/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing RGB-T tracking networks extract modality features in a separate manner, which lacks interaction and mutual guidance between modalities. This limits the network's ability to adapt to the diverse dual-modality appearances of targets and the dynamic relationships between the modalities. Additionally, the three-stage fusion tracking paradigm followed by these networks significantly restricts the tracking speed. To overcome these problems, we propose a unified single-stage Transformer RGB-T tracking network, namely USTrack, which unifies the above three stages into a single ViT (Vision Transformer) backbone with a dual embedding layer through self-attention mechanism. With this structure, the network can extract fusion features of the template and search region under the mutual interaction of modalities. Simultaneously, relation modeling is performed between these features, efficiently obtaining the search region fusion features with better target-background discriminability for prediction. Furthermore, we introduce a novel feature selection mechanism based on modality reliability to mitigate the influence of invalid modalities for prediction, further improving the tracking performance. Extensive experiments on three popular RGB-T tracking benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance while maintaining the fastest inference speed 84.2FPS. In particular, MPR/MSR on the short-term and long-term subsets of VTUAV dataset increased by 11.1%/11.7% and 11.3%/9.7%.