# SDSTrack: Self-Distillation Symmetric Adapter Learning for Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16002 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16002/

## Key facts

- Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 57 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11703/) (2018)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06825/) (2021)
- [ATOM: Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07628/) (2018)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [Siam R-CNN: Visual Tracking by Re-Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12836/) (2019)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (2022)
- [VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05015/) (2021)
- [SwinTrack: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00995/) (2021)
- [RGB-T Object Tracking:Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08982/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [XTrack: Multimodal Training Boosts RGB-X Video Object Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17773/) (2024)
- [RGBT Tracking via All-layer Multimodal Interactions with Progressive Fusion Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08827/) (2024)
- [What You Have is What You Track: Adaptive and Robust Multimodal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05899/) (2025)
- [Cross-modulated Attention Transformer for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02222/) (2024)
- [MambaVT: Spatio-Temporal Contextual Modeling for robust RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07889/) (2024)
- [MambaEVT: Event Stream based Visual Object Tracking using State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10487/) (2024)
- [Breaking Modality Gap in RGBT Tracking: Coupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11586/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Perception for Unified Visual Multi-modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06583/) (2025)
- [CSTrack: Enhancing RGB-X Tracking via Compact Spatiotemporal Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19434/) (2025)
- [Catching the Details: Self-Distilled RoI Predictors for Fine-Grained MLLM Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16944/) (2025)
- [AFter: Attention-based Fusion Router for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02717/) (2024)
- [Fully Spiking Neural Networks for Unified Frame-Event Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20834/) (2025)
- [Video Understanding: From Geometry and Semantics to Unified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17840/) (2026)
- [Collaborating Vision, Depth, and Thermal Signals for Multi-Modal Tracking: Dataset and Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24741/) (2025)
- [Breaking Shallow Limits: Task-Driven Pixel Fusion for Gap-free RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11247/) (2025)
- [Diff-MM: Exploring Pre-trained Text-to-Image Generation Model for Unified Multi-modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12606/) (2025)
- [Mamba-FETrack V2: Revisiting State Space Model for Frame-Event based Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23783/) (2025)
- [Omni Survey for Multimodality Analysis in Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13000/) (2025)
- [FARTrack: Fast Autoregressive Visual Tracking with High Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03214/) (2026)
- [UETrack: A Unified and Efficient Framework for Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01412/) (2026)
- [RAGTrack: Language-aware RGBT Tracking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03617/) (2026)
- [UASTrack: A Unified Adaptive Selection Framework with Modality-Customization in Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18220/) (2025)
- [Towards General Multimodal Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11218/) (2025)
- [Learning Frequency and Memory-Aware Prompts for Multi-Modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23972/) (2025)
- [DMTrack: Spatio-Temporal Multimodal Tracking via Dual-Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01592/) (2025)
- [SwiTrack: Tri-State Switch for Cross-Modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16227/) (2025)
- [Decoupling Amplitude and Phase Attention in Frequency Domain for RGB-Event based Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01022/) (2026)
- [GOT-Edit: Geometry-Aware Generic Object Tracking via Online Model Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08550/) (2026)
- [Uni-MDTrack: Learning Decoupled Memory and Dynamic States for Parameter-Efficient Visual Tracking in All Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14452/) (2026)
- [Unified Multimodal Visual Tracking with Dual Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03716/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Visual Object Tracking (VOT) has recently gained significant attention due to its robustness. Early research focused on fully fine-tuning RGB-based trackers, which was inefficient and lacked generalized representation due to the scarcity of multimodal data. Therefore, recent studies have utilized prompt tuning to transfer pre-trained RGB-based trackers to multimodal data. However, the modality gap limits pre-trained knowledge recall, and the dominance of the RGB modality persists, preventing the full utilization of information from other modalities. To address these issues, we propose a novel symmetric multimodal tracking framework called SDSTrack. We introduce lightweight adaptation for efficient fine-tuning, which directly transfers the feature extraction ability from RGB to other domains with a small number of trainable parameters and integrates multimodal features in a balanced, symmetric manner. Furthermore, we design a complementary masked patch distillation strategy to enhance the robustness of trackers in complex environments, such as extreme weather, poor imaging, and sensor failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDSTrack outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various multimodal tracking scenarios, including RGB+Depth, RGB+Thermal, and RGB+Event tracking, and exhibits impressive results in extreme conditions. Our source code is available at https://github.com/hoqolo/SDSTrack.