# Diff-MM: Exploring Pre-trained Text-to-Image Generation Model for Unified Multi-modal Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12606 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12606/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [GeoWizard: Unleashing the Diffusion Priors for 3D Geometry Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12013/) (2024)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [ECO: Efficient Convolution Operators for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09224/) (2016)
- [Probabilistic Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12565/) (2020)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [EmbodiedScan: A Holistic Multi-Modal 3D Perception Suite Towards Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16170/) (2023)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05015/) (2021)

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

- [MagCache: Fast Video Generation with Magnitude-Aware Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09045/) (2025)
- [Efficient Agentic Reasoning Through Self-Regulated Simulative Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22138/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal object tracking integrates auxiliary modalities such as depth, thermal infrared, event flow, and language to provide additional information beyond RGB images, showing great potential in improving tracking stabilization in complex scenarios. Existing methods typically start from an RGB-based tracker and learn to understand auxiliary modalities only from training data. Constrained by the limited multi-modal training data, the performance of these methods is unsatisfactory. To alleviate this limitation, this work proposes a unified multi-modal tracker Diff-MM by exploiting the multi-modal understanding capability of the pre-trained text-to-image generation model. Diff-MM leverages the UNet of pre-trained Stable Diffusion as a tracking feature extractor through the proposed parallel feature extraction pipeline, which enables pairwise image inputs for object tracking. We further introduce a multi-modal sub-module tuning method that learns to gain complementary information between different modalities. By harnessing the extensive prior knowledge in the generation model, we achieve a unified tracker with uniform parameters for RGB-N/D/T/E tracking. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our method compared with recently proposed trackers, e.g., its AUC outperforms OneTracker by 8.3% on TNL2K.