Models as Tools: An Agentic Coordination Framework for Unified Multimodal Visual Tracking
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Most current visual trackers adopt a matching-based architecture trained exclusively on tracking datasets, whose performance gains depend heavily on the length of the input context, and have now reached a bottleneck. While high-performance tracking increasingly relies on foundation models, existing methods use them monolithically, adapting a foundation model into a tracker or modify a segmentation foundation model into a tracking pipeline, which fails to exploit complementary strengths. Matching-based trackers excel at instance-level correspondence but lack semantic discrimination and fine-grained foreground perception, whereas segmentation foundation models produce precise masks yet struggle with instance discrimination and multimodal extension. Both paradigms also lack error-correction capabilities for long-term tracking. To address these issues, we propose ACTrack, an agentic coordination framework that treats heterogeneous models as invocable tools under an event-triggered mechanism. ACTrack coordinates a Tracker-based Instance Matching Tool for target discrimination, a SAM3 Motion Tool for mask-derived motion priors, a SAM3 Perception Tool for detecting distractors and instance-conflict cues, and a VLM Reprompt Tool activated only under persistent conflict to mitigate error accumulation. We design a complete tool-invocation trigger mechanism and an inter-tool coordination mechanism, enabling the complementary strengths of different model tools to be fully integrated. Experiments show that ACTrack substantially surpasses the strongest and the largest trackers on eight RGB benchmarks. Furthermore, a parameter-efficient adaptation strategy enables parameter sharing and reuse across tools, achieving unified multimodal tracking with only 30% trainable parameters while substantially outperforming prior methods on multimodal benchmarks such as LasHeR, VisEvent, TNL2K, and DepthTrack.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 58 of its 72 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2026.
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58 of 72 references.
References · 58
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
- 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,974
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
- 2019Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regressioncited by 1,368
- 2017Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metriccited by 910
- 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
- 2016Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Trackingcited by 568
- 2018GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wildcited by 475
- 2018SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networkscited by 446
- 2018LaSOT: A High-quality Benchmark for Large-scale Single Object Trackingcited by 429
- 2021Transformer Trackingcited by 412
- 2021Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Trackingcited by 350
38 more
- 2018TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wildcited by 343
- 2022Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Frameworkcited by 330
- 2022MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attentioncited by 281
- 2023Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Trackingcited by 142
- 2017Need for Speed: A Benchmark for Higher Frame Rate Object Trackingcited by 137
- 2022AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Trackingcited by 137
- 2021Learning Target Candidate Association to Keep Track of What Not to Trackcited by 131
- 2021VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flowscited by 129
- 2024ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Trackingcited by 129
- 2021Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmarkcited by 126
- 2021LasHeR: A Large-scale High-diversity Benchmark for RGBT Trackingcited by 96
- 2023Generalized Relation Modeling for Transformer Trackingcited by 93
- 2023Robust Object Modeling for Visual Trackingcited by 80
- 2024Autoregressive Queries for Adaptive Tracking with Spatio-TemporalTransformerscited by 76
- 2023HIPTrack: Visual Tracking with Historical Promptscited by 71
- 2024Tracking Meets LoRA: Faster Training, Larger Model, Stronger Performancecited by 70
- 2021DepthTrack : Unveiling the Power of RGBD Trackingcited by 67
- 2024A Distractor-Aware Memory for Visual Object Tracking with SAM2cited by 66
- 2023Single-Model and Any-Modality for Video Object Trackingcited by 65
- 2024OneTracker: Unifying Visual Object Tracking with Foundation Models and Efficient Tuningcited by 65
- 2022Prompting for Multi-Modal Trackingcited by 59
- 2023Joint Visual Grounding and Tracking with Natural Language Specificationcited by 59
- 2023ARTrackV2: Prompting Autoregressive Tracker Where to Look and How to Describecited by 59
- 2026Seed2.0 Model Card: Towards Intelligence Frontier for Real-World Complexitycited by 58
- 2024Exploiting Multimodal Spatial-temporal Patterns for Video Object Trackingcited by 57
- 2024SUTrack: Towards Simple and Unified Single Object Trackingcited by 52
- 2024Elysium: Exploring Object-level Perception in Videos via MLLMcited by 48
- 2023Merlin:Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Mindscited by 46
- 2024SDSTrack: Self-Distillation Symmetric Adapter Learning for Multi-Modal Visual Object Trackingcited by 44
- 2024Exploring Enhanced Contextual Information for Video-Level Object Trackingcited by 37
- 2024Unifying Visual and Vision-Language Tracking via Contrastive Learningcited by 27
- 2024VastTrack: Vast Category Visual Object Trackingcited by 26
- 2025SPMTrack: Spatio-Temporal Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Mixture of Experts for Scalable Visual Trackingcited by 24
- 2023Unified Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Single- and Multi-Modal Visual Object Trackingcited by 21
- 2026Does Your Reasoning Model Implicitly Know When to Stop Thinking?cited by 19
- 2025Adaptive Batch-Wise Sample Scheduling for Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 17
- 2025What You Have is What You Track: Adaptive and Robust Multimodal Trackingcited by 15
- 2026Real-Time Aligned Reward Model beyond Semanticscited by 13
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- 2026When Trackers Fail: VLM-Guided Verification and Recovery for Robust Video Object Segmentation
- 2026ReferTrack: Referring Then Tracking for Embodied Visual Tracking
- 2026Unified Multimodal Visual Tracking with Dual Mixture-of-Experts
- 2026SEATrack: Simple, Efficient, and Adaptive Multimodal Tracker
- 2026AgentSTAR: Agentic Shape Tracking and Reconstruction from Monocular Videos
- 2025TrackVLA++: Unleashing Reasoning and Memory Capabilities in VLA Models for Embodied Visual Tracking
- 2025TrackVLA: Embodied Visual Tracking in the Wild
- 2026VLX-Go: Robust Embodied Tracking through Multi-Stage Learning and On-Policy Refinement