# MAETrack: Unleashing the Potential of Pretrained Geometric Priors for 3D Single Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16695 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16695/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [A Novel Performance Evaluation Methodology for Single-Target Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01313/) (2015)
- [P2B: Point-to-Box Network for 3D Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13888/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Shape Completion for 3D Siamese Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01784/) (2019)
- [Box-Aware Feature Enhancement for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04728/) (2021)
- [PTTR: Relational 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02857/) (2021)
- [PTT: Point-Track-Transformer Module for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06455/) (2021)
- [Beyond 3D Siamese Tracking: A Motion-Centric Paradigm for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01730/) (2022)
- [3D Siamese Voxel-to-BEV Tracker for Sparse Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04426/) (2021)
- [3D Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14921/) (2021)
- [3D-SiamRPN: An End-to-End Learning Method for Real-Time 3D Single Object Tracking Using Raw Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05630/) (2021)
- [FastPillars: A Deployment-friendly Pillar-based 3D Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02367/) (2023)
- [GeoMAE: Masked Geometric Target Prediction for Self-supervised Point Cloud Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08808/) (2023)
- [LiDAR-PTQ: Post-Training Quantization for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15865/) (2024)
- [Real-time 3D Single Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00860/) (2022)
- [MBPTrack: Improving 3D Point Cloud Tracking with Memory Networks and Box Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05071/) (2023)
- [GLT-T: Global-Local Transformer Voting for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10927/) (2022)
- [BEV-MAE: Bird's Eye View Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Pre-training in Autonomous Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05758/) (2022)
- [Exploring Point-BEV Fusion for 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05216/) (2022)
- [Synchronize Feature Extracting and Matching: A Single Branch Framework for 3D Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12549/) (2023)
- [An Effective Motion-Centric Paradigm for 3D Single Object Tracking in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12535/) (2023)
- [P2P: Part-to-Part Motion Cues Guide a Strong Tracking Framework for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05238/) (2024)
- [MVCTrack: Boosting 3D Point Cloud Tracking via Multimodal-Guided Virtual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02734/) (2024)
- [CompTrack: Information Bottleneck-Guided Low-Rank Dynamic Token Compression for Point Cloud Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15580/) (2025)
- [FocusTrack: One-Stage Focus-and-Suppress Framework for 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24133/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale pre-training has transformed representation learning in 2D vision, yet its transferability to 3D single object tracking (SOT) remains insufficiently understood. Directly fine-tuning self-supervised 3D encoders, such as masked autoencoders (MAE), often leads to sub-optimal adaptation because the reconstruction objective is not fully aligned with the spatial-temporal matching requirements of tracking. In this paper, we observe that this difficulty can be interpreted as a layer-wise transfer mismatch: shallow layers tend to preserve transferable geometric cues, while deeper layers become increasingly specialized to the reconstruction pretext task and are less suitable for downstream tracking. Based on this observation, we propose MAETrack, a lightweight adaptation framework for transferring pre-training MAE representations to 3D SOT. MAETrack includes Layer-Selective Initialization (LSI), which initializes only the shallow stages of the tracking backbone from pre-trained weights while re-initializing deeper stages, and Geometric Residual Gating (GRG), which reinforces structurally salient regions in the search BEV features before template-search fusion through residual spatial modulation. Extensive experiments on standard 3D SOT benchmarks show that MAETrack consistently improves upon vanilla fine-tuning baselines with limited computational overhead. More broadly, our results suggest that effective transfer from 3D reconstruction pre-training to 3D tracking is not merely a matter of partial fine-tuning, but depends on a tracking-oriented transfer principle that preserves shallow geometry while adapting deeper representations to the downstream objective.