# ATSTrack: Enhancing Visual-Language Tracking by Aligning Temporal and Spatial Scales

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00454/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2025.

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

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [SiamCAR: Siamese Fully Convolutional Classification and Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07241/) (2019)
- [ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01686/) (2024)
- [Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16746/) (2021)
- [SwinTrack: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00995/) (2021)
- [Generalized Relation Modeling for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16580/) (2023)
- [Robust Object Modeling for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05140/) (2023)
- [HIPTrack: Visual Tracking with Historical Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02072/) (2023)
- [Tracking Meets LoRA: Faster Training, Larger Model, Stronger Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05231/) (2024)
- [Correlation-Aware Deep Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01666/) (2022)
- [Towards Unified Token Learning for Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14103/) (2023)
- [Joint Visual Grounding and Tracking with Natural Language Specification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12027/) (2023)
- [MixFormerV2: Efficient Fully Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15896/) (2023)
- [Divert More Attention to Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01076/) (2022)
- [CiteTracker: Correlating Image and Text for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11322/) (2023)
- [Target-Aware Tracking with Long-term Context Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13840/) (2023)
- [Unifying Visual and Vision-Language Tracking via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11228/) (2024)
- [DTLLM-VLT: Diverse Text Generation for Visual Language Tracking Based on LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12139/) (2024)
- [Context-Aware Integration of Language and Visual References for Natural Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19975/) (2024)
- [OST: Refining Text Knowledge with Optimal Spatio-Temporal Descriptor for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00096/) (2023)
- [Towards Sequence-Level Training for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05810/) (2022)
- [Beyond MOT: Semantic Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05021/) (2024)
- [RTracker: Recoverable Tracking via PN Tree Structured Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19242/) (2024)

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

- [ReasoningTrack: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Long-term Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05221/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Parsing and Updating Natural Language Specification using VLMs for Robust Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29357/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A main challenge of Visual-Language Tracking (VLT) is the misalignment between visual inputs and language descriptions caused by target movement. Previous trackers have explored many effective feature modification methods to preserve more aligned features. However, an important yet unexplored factor ultimately hinders their capability, which is the inherent differences in the temporal and spatial scale of information between visual and language inputs. To address this issue, we propose a novel visual-language tracker that enhances the effect of feature modification by Aligning Temporal and Spatial scale of different input components, named as ATSTrack. Specifically, we decompose each language description into phrases with different attributes based on their temporal and spatial correspondence with visual inputs, and modify their features in a fine-grained manner. Moreover, we introduce a Visual-Language token that comprises modified linguistic information from the previous frame to guide the model to extract visual features that are more relevant to language description, thereby reducing the impact caused by the differences in spatial scale. Experimental results show that our proposed ATSTrack achieves performance comparable to existing methods. Our code will be released.