# An Efficient Token Compression Framework for Visual Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08329 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08329/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [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)
- [MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15947/) (2024)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [STMTrack: Template-free Visual Tracking with Space-time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00324/) (2021)
- [Transformer Tracking with Cyclic Shifting Window Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03806/) (2022)
- [OtterHD: A High-Resolution Multi-modality Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04219/) (2023)
- [HIPTrack: Visual Tracking with Historical Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02072/) (2023)
- [Siamese Cascaded Region Proposal Networks for Real-Time Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06148/) (2018)
- [Towards Unified Token Learning for Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14103/) (2023)

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

- [Models as Tools: An Agentic Coordination Framework for Unified Multimodal Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00847/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Refining visual representations by eliminating their internal feature-level redundancy is crucial for simultaneously optimizing the performance and computational cost of models in visual tracking. To enhance their performance, many contemporary Transformer-based trackers leverage a larger number of historical template frames to capture richer spatio-temporal cues. However, this strategy leads to a massive number of input visual tokens. This creates two critical issues: it imposes a quadratic computational burden and can also degrade the tracker's overall performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a compress-then-interact tracking framework, ETCTrack, that learns to efficiently compress template tokens from historical template frames into a robust target representation, moving beyond handcrafted rules. Our method first employs the Adaptive Token Compressor to dynamically construct compact yet highly discriminative template tokens by filtering out redundant visual tokens. These refined template tokens are then processed by our Hierarchical Interaction Encoder to achieve a deep, adaptive interaction with the search features. Refined search features ensure subsequent precise target localization. Experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers. ETCTrack-B224 reduces the number of template tokens by 60%, leading to a 21.4% reduction in MACs with only a 0.4% drop in accuracy. The source code are available at https://github.com/PJD-WJ/ETCTrack.