# Boosting Self-Supervised Tracking with Contextual Prompts and Noise Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06092 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06092/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Learning Discriminative Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07220/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Learning Correspondence from the Cycle-Consistency of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07593/) (2019)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10721/) (2020)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03465/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Alpha-Refine: Boosting Tracking Performance by Precise Bounding Box Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02024/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Queries for Adaptive Tracking with Spatio-TemporalTransformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10574/) (2024)
- [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)
- [ARTrackV2: Prompting Autoregressive Tracker Where to Look and How to Describe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17133/) (2023)
- [ReTrack: Evidence-Driven Dual-Stream Directional Anchor Calibration Network for Composed Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17898/) (2026)
- [Exploring Enhanced Contextual Information for Video-Level Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11023/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AnyTrack: Unifying Visual Object Tracking with Any Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06773/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning robust contextual knowledge from unlabeled videos is essential for advancing self-supervised tracking. However, conventional self-supervised trackers lack effective context modeling, while existing context association methods based on non-semantic queries struggle to adapt to unlabeled tracking scenarios, making it difficult to learn reliable contextual cues. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised tracking framework, named tracker, which introduces a dual-modal context association mechanism that jointly leverages fine-grained semantic prompts and contextual noise to drive the model toward learning robust tracking representations. Adherent to the easy-to-hard learning principle, our contextual association mechanism operates based on two stages. During early training, instance patch tokens (prompts) are assigned to both forward and backward tracking branches to facilitate the acquisition of tracking knowledge. As training progresses, contextual noise is gradually injected into the model to perturb feature, encouraging the tracker to learn robust tracking representations in a more complex feature space. Thus, this novel contextual association mechanism enables our self-supervised model to learn high-quality tracking representations from unlabeled videos, while being applied exclusively during training to preserve efficient inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.
