# Distractor-Aware Memory-Based Visual Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13864 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13864/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [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)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [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)
- [YouTube-VOS: A Large-Scale Video Object Segmentation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03327/) (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)
- [Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00989/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [SiamCAR: Siamese Fully Convolutional Classification and Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07241/) (2019)
- [Need for Speed: A Benchmark for Higher Frame Rate Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05884/) (2017)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03465/) (2020)
- [Learning Target Candidate Association to Keep Track of What Not to Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16556/) (2021)
- [ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01686/) (2024)
- [Backbone is All Your Need: A Simplified Architecture for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05328/) (2022)
- [A Novel Performance Evaluation Methodology for Single-Target Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01313/) (2015)
- [SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11922/) (2024)
- [SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16268/) (2024)
- [LVOS: A Benchmark for Long-term Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10181/) (2022)

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

- [LiAM-SAM: Lifecycle-Aware Memory for Robust SAM2-Based MOT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28078/) (2026)
- [SAM3RL: Memory Control via Reinforcement Learning for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19931/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent emergence of memory-based video segmentation methods such as SAM2 has led to models with excellent performance in segmentation tasks, achieving leading results on numerous benchmarks. However, these modes are not fully adjusted for visual object tracking, where distractors (i.e., objects visually similar to the target) pose a key challenge. In this paper we propose a distractor-aware drop-in memory module and introspection-based management method for SAM2, leading to DAM4SAM. Our design effectively reduces the tracking drift toward distractors and improves redetection capability after object occlusion. To facilitate the analysis of tracking in the presence of distractors, we construct DiDi, a Distractor-Distilled dataset. DAM4SAM outperforms SAM2.1 on thirteen benchmarks and sets new state-of-the-art results on ten. Furthermore, integrating the proposed distractor-aware memory into a real-time tracker EfficientTAM leads to 11% improvement and matches tracking quality of the non-real-time SAM2.1-L on multiple tracking and segmentation benchmarks, while integration with edge-based tracker EdgeTAM delivers 4% performance boost, demonstrating a very good generalization across architectures.