# Exploring Modality-Aware Fusion and Decoupled Temporal Propagation for Multi-Modal Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09287 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09287/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [Learning Discriminative Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07220/) (2019)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [ATOM: Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07628/) (2018)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (2022)
- [VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05015/) (2021)
- [ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01686/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DepthTrack : Unveiling the Power of RGBD Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13962/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Task-Customized Mixture of Adapters for General Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12494/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Multimodal Spatial-temporal Patterns for Video Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15691/) (2024)
- [SUTrack: Towards Simple and Unified Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19138/) (2024)
- [RGBD1K: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for RGB-D Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09787/) (2022)
- [Exploring Enhanced Contextual Information for Video-Level Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11023/) (2024)
- [Generative-based Fusion Mechanism for Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01728/) (2023)
- [Target-Aware Tracking with Long-term Context Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13840/) (2023)
- [Multi-State Tracker: Enhancing Efficient Object Tracking via Multi-State Specialization and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11531/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing multimodal trackers adopt uniform fusion strategies, overlooking the inherent differences between modalities. Moreover, they propagate temporal information through mixed tokens, leading to entangled and less discriminative temporal representations. To address these limitations, we propose MDTrack, a novel framework for modality aware fusion and decoupled temporal propagation in multimodal object tracking. Specifically, for modality aware fusion, we allocate dedicated experts to each modality, including infrared, event, depth, and RGB, to process their respective representations. The gating mechanism within the Mixture of Experts dynamically selects the optimal experts based on the input features, enabling adaptive and modality specific fusion. For decoupled temporal propagation, we introduce two separate State Space Model structures to independently store and update the hidden states of the RGB and X modal streams, effectively capturing their distinct temporal information. To ensure synergy between the two temporal representations, we incorporate a set of cross attention modules between the input features of the two SSMs, facilitating implicit information exchange. The resulting temporally enriched features are then integrated into the backbone through another set of cross attention modules, enhancing MDTrack's ability to leverage temporal information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Both MDTrack S and MDTrack U achieve state of the art performance across five multimodal tracking benchmarks.