# Robust Tracking via Mamba-based Context-aware Token Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13611 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13611/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Point clouds, detection and remote sensing, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 33 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Point clouds, detection and remote sensing](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/point-clouds-detection-and-remote-sensing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [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)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)
- [ECO: Efficient Convolution Operators for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09224/) (2016)
- [Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10721/) (2020)
- [Siamese Box Adaptive Network for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06761/) (2020)
- [SiamFC++: Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Tracking with Target Estimation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06188/) (2019)
- [MambaOut: Do We Really Need Mamba for Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07992/) (2024)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (2022)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03465/) (2020)
- [ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01686/) (2024)
- [Generalized Relation Modeling for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16580/) (2023)
- [STMTrack: Template-free Visual Tracking with Space-time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00324/) (2021)
- [Robust Object Modeling for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05140/) (2023)
- [Learning the Model Update for Siamese Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00855/) (2019)
- [Autoregressive Queries for Adaptive Tracking with Spatio-TemporalTransformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10574/) (2024)
- [HIPTrack: Visual Tracking with Historical Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02072/) (2023)
- [Compact Transformer Tracker with Correlative Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10938/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Similarity-Guided Layer-Adaptive Vision Transformer for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06625/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Perception for Unified Visual Multi-modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06583/) (2025)
- [ReasoningTrack: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Long-term Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05221/) (2025)
- [Explicit Context Reasoning with Supervision for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16191/) (2025)
- [VPTracker: Global Vision-Language Tracking via Visual Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22799/) (2025)
- [MrTrack: Register Mamba for Needle Tracking with Rapid Reciprocating Motion during Ultrasound-Guided Aspiration Biopsy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09450/) (2025)
- [SportMamba: Adaptive Non-Linear Multi-Object Tracking with State Space Models for Team Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03335/) (2025)
- [Tracking and Segmenting Anything in Any Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19475/) (2025)
- [SMTrack: State-Aware Mamba for Efficient Temporal Modeling in Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01677/) (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)
- [An Efficient Token Compression Framework for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08329/) (2026)
- [GOT-JEPA: Generic Object Tracking with Model Adaptation and Occlusion Handling using Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14771/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Parsing and Updating Natural Language Specification using VLMs for Robust Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29357/) (2026)
- [E-TraMamba: A New Paradigm for Efficient Long-Term 3D Feature Tracking with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02866/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How to make a good trade-off between performance and computational cost is crucial for a tracker. However, current famous methods typically focus on complicated and time-consuming learning that combining temporal and appearance information by input more and more images (or features). Consequently, these methods not only increase the model's computational source and learning burden but also introduce much useless and potentially interfering information. To alleviate the above issues, we propose a simple yet robust tracker that separates temporal information learning from appearance modeling and extracts temporal relations from a set of representative tokens rather than several images (or features). Specifically, we introduce one track token for each frame to collect the target's appearance information in the backbone. Then, we design a mamba-based Temporal Module for track tokens to be aware of context by interacting with other track tokens within a sliding window. This module consists of a mamba layer with autoregressive characteristic and a cross-attention layer with strong global perception ability, ensuring sufficient interaction for track tokens to perceive the appearance changes and movement trends of the target. Finally, track tokens serve as a guidance to adjust the appearance feature for the final prediction in the head. Experiments show our method is effective and achieves competitive performance on multiple benchmarks at a real-time speed. Code and trained models will be available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/TemTrack.