# GateMOT: Q-Gated Attention for Dense Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26353 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26353/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 80 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07736/) (2020)
- [TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02702/) (2021)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [Tracking Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01177/) (2020)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [Tracking without bells and whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05625/) (2019)
- [MOTR: End-to-End Multiple-Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03247/) (2021)
- [TransTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15460/) (2020)
- [MOT20: A benchmark for multi object tracking in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09003/) (2020)
- [Observation-Centric SORT: Rethinking SORT for Robust Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14360/) (2022)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [Track to Detect and Segment: An Online Multi-Object Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08808/) (2021)
- [MOTRv2: Bootstrapping End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking by Pretrained Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09791/) (2022)
- [MOTChallenge: A Benchmark for Single-Camera Multiple Target Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07548/) (2020)
- [Detect to Track and Track to Detect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03958/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While large models demonstrate the strong representational power of vanilla attention, this core mechanism cannot be directly applied to Dense Object Tracking: its quadratic all-to-all interactions are computationally prohibitive for dense motion estimation on high-resolution features. This mismatch prevents Dense Object Tracking from fully leveraging attention-based modeling in crowded and occlusion-heavy scenes. To address this challenge, we introduce GateMOT, an online tracking framework centered on Q-Gated Attention (Q-Attention), an efficient and spatially aware attention variant. Our key idea is to repurpose the Query from a similarity-conditioning term into a learnable gating unit. This Gating-Query (Gating-Q) produces a probabilistic gate that modulates Key features in an element-wise manner, enabling explicit relevance selection instead of costly global aggregation. Built on this mechanism, parallel Q-Attention heads transform one shared feature map into task-specific yet consistent representations for detection, motion, and re-identification, yielding a tightly coupled multi-task decoder with linear-complexity gating operations. GateMOT achieves state-of-the-art HOTA of 48.4, MOTA of 67.8, and IDF1 of 64.5 on BEE24, and demonstrates strong performance on additional Dense Object Tracking benchmarks. These results show that Q-Attention is a simple, effective, and transferable building block for attention-based tracking in dense tracking scenarios.