How Texts Help? A Fine-grained Evaluation to Reveal the Role of Language in Vision-Language Tracking

Vision-language tracking (VLT) extends traditional single object tracking by incorporating textual information, providing semantic guidance to enhance tracking performance under challenging conditions like fast motion and deformations. However, current VLT trackers often underperform compared to single-modality methods on multiple benchmarks, with semantic information sometimes becoming a "distraction." To address this, we propose VLTVerse, the first fine-grained evaluation framework for VLT trackers that comprehensively considers multiple challenge factors and diverse semantic information, hoping to reveal the role of language in VLT. Our contributions include: (1) VLTVerse introduces 10 sequence-level challenge labels and 6 types of multi-granularity semantic information, creating a flexible and multi-dimensional evaluation space for VLT; (2) leveraging 60 subspaces formed by combinations of challenge factors and semantic types, we conduct systematic fine-grained evaluations of three mainstream SOTA VLT trackers, uncovering their performance bottlenecks across complex scenarios and offering a novel perspective on VLT evaluation; (3) through decoupled analysis of experimental results, we examine the impact of various semantic types on specific challenge factors in relation to different algorithms, providing essential guidance for enhancing VLT across data, evaluation, and algorithmic dimensions. The VLTVerse, toolkit, and results will be available at \url{http://metaverse.aitestunion.com}.

DTVLT: A Multi-modal Diverse Text Benchmark for Visual Language Tracking Based on LLM

Visual language tracking (VLT) has emerged as a cutting-edge research area, harnessing linguistic data to enhance algorithms with multi-modal inputs and broadening the scope of traditional single object tracking (SOT) to encompass video understanding applications. Despite this, most VLT benchmarks still depend on succinct, human-annotated text descriptions for each video. These descriptions often fall short in capturing the nuances of video content dynamics and lack stylistic variety in language, constrained by their uniform level of detail and a fixed annotation frequency. As a result, algorithms tend to default to a "memorize the answer" strategy, diverging from the core objective of achieving a deeper understanding of video content. Fortunately, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the generation of diverse text. This work utilizes LLMs to generate varied semantic annotations (in terms of text lengths and granularities) for representative SOT benchmarks, thereby establishing a novel multi-modal benchmark. Specifically, we (1) propose a new visual language tracking benchmark with diverse texts, named DTVLT, based on five prominent VLT and SOT benchmarks, including three sub-tasks: short-term tracking, long-term tracking, and global instance tracking. (2) We offer four granularity texts in our benchmark, considering the extent and density of semantic information. We expect this multi-granular generation strategy to foster a favorable environment for VLT and video understanding research. (3) We conduct comprehensive experimental analyses on DTVLT, evaluating the impact of diverse text on tracking performance and hope the identified performance bottlenecks of existing algorithms can support further research in VLT and video understanding. The proposed benchmark, experimental results and toolkit will be released gradually on http://videocube.aitestunion.com/.

Visual Language Tracking with Multi-modal Interaction: A Robust Benchmark

Visual Language Tracking (VLT) enhances tracking by mitigating the limitations of relying solely on the visual modality, utilizing high-level semantic information through language. This integration of the language enables more advanced human-machine interaction. The essence of interaction is cognitive alignment, which typically requires multiple information exchanges, especially in the sequential decision-making process of VLT. However, current VLT benchmarks do not account for multi-round interactions during tracking. They provide only an initial text and bounding box (bbox) in the first frame, with no further interaction as tracking progresses, deviating from the original motivation of the VLT task. To address these limitations, we propose a novel and robust benchmark, VLT-MI (Visual Language Tracking with Multi-modal Interaction), which introduces multi-round interaction into the VLT task for the first time. (1) We generate diverse, multi-granularity texts for multi-round, multi-modal interaction based on existing mainstream VLT benchmarks using DTLLM-VLT, leveraging the world knowledge of LLMs. (2) We propose a new VLT interaction paradigm that achieves multi-round interaction through text updates and object recovery. When multiple tracking failures occur, we provide the tracker with more aligned texts and corrected bboxes through interaction, thereby expanding the scope of VLT downstream tasks. (3) We conduct comparative experiments on both traditional VLT benchmarks and VLT-MI, evaluating and analyzing the accuracy and robustness of trackers under the interactive paradigm. This work offers new insights and paradigms for the VLT task, enabling a fine-grained evaluation of multi-modal trackers. We believe this approach can be extended to additional datasets in the future, supporting broader evaluations and comparisons of video-language model capabilities.

DTLLM-VLT: Diverse Text Generation for Visual Language Tracking Based on LLM

Visual Language Tracking (VLT) enhances single object tracking (SOT) by integrating natural language descriptions from a video, for the precise tracking of a specified object. By leveraging high-level semantic information, VLT guides object tracking, alleviating the constraints associated with relying on a visual modality. Nevertheless, most VLT benchmarks are annotated in a single granularity and lack a coherent semantic framework to provide scientific guidance. Moreover, coordinating human annotators for high-quality annotations is laborious and time-consuming. To address these challenges, we introduce DTLLM-VLT, which automatically generates extensive and multi-granularity text to enhance environmental diversity. (1) DTLLM-VLT generates scientific and multi-granularity text descriptions using a cohesive prompt framework. Its succinct and highly adaptable design allows seamless integration into various visual tracking benchmarks. (2) We select three prominent benchmarks to deploy our approach: short-term tracking, long-term tracking, and global instance tracking. We offer four granularity combinations for these benchmarks, considering the extent and density of semantic information, thereby showcasing the practicality and versatility of DTLLM-VLT. (3) We conduct comparative experiments on VLT benchmarks with different text granularities, evaluating and analyzing the impact of diverse text on tracking performance. Conclusionally, this work leverages LLM to provide multi-granularity semantic information for VLT task from efficient and diverse perspectives, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multi-modal trackers. In the future, we believe this work can be extended to more datasets to support vision datasets understanding.