# Breaking Shallow Limits: Task-Driven Pixel Fusion for Gap-free RGBT Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11247/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2025.

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

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [CDDFuse: Correlation-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14461/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02097/) (2023)
- [RGB-T Object Tracking:Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08982/) (2018)
- [LasHeR: A Large-scale High-diversity Benchmark for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13202/) (2021)
- [Visible-Thermal UAV Tracking: A Large-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04120/) (2022)
- [LRRNet: A Novel Representation Learning Guided Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05172/) (2023)
- [Single-Model and Any-Modality for Video Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15851/) (2023)
- [OneTracker: Unifying Visual Object Tracking with Foundation Models and Efficient Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09634/) (2024)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion for End-to-End RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11714/) (2019)
- [Prompting for Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14571/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Bi-directional Adapter for Multi-modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10611/) (2023)
- [SDSTrack: Self-Distillation Symmetric Adapter Learning for Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16002/) (2024)
- [Dense Feature Aggregation and Pruning for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10451/) (2019)
- [Multi-Adapter RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07485/) (2019)
- [Duality-Gated Mutual Condition Network for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07188/) (2020)
- [MambaDFuse: A Mamba-based Dual-phase Model for Multi-modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08406/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Temporal Adaptive RGBT Tracking with Modality Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01244/) (2024)
- [Exploring Fusion Strategies for Accurate RGBT Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08673/) (2022)
- [DropMAE: Learning Representations via Masked Autoencoders with Spatial-Attention Dropout for Temporal Matching Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00571/) (2023)
- [RGBT Tracking via All-layer Multimodal Interactions with Progressive Fusion Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08827/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current RGBT tracking methods often overlook the impact of fusion location on mitigating modality gap, which is key factor to effective tracking. Our analysis reveals that shallower fusion yields smaller distribution gap. However, the limited discriminative power of shallow networks hard to distinguish task-relevant information from noise, limiting the potential of pixel-level fusion. To break shallow limits, we propose a novel Task-driven Pixel-level Fusion network, named TPF, which unveils the power of pixel-level fusion in RGBT tracking through a progressive learning framework. In particular, we design a lightweight Pixel-level Fusion Adapter (PFA) that exploits Mamba's linear complexity to ensure real-time, low-latency RGBT tracking. To enhance the fusion capabilities of the PFA, our task-driven progressive learning framework first utilizes adaptive multi-expert distillation to inherits fusion knowledge from state-of-the-art image fusion models, establishing robust initialization, and then employs a decoupled representation learning scheme to achieve task-relevant information fusion. Moreover, to overcome appearance variations between the initial template and search frames, we presents a nearest-neighbor dynamic template updating scheme, which selects the most reliable frame closest to the current search frame as the dynamic template. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TPF significantly outperforms existing most of advanced trackers on four public RGBT tracking datasets. The code will be released upon acceptance.