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Exploring Modality-Aware Fusion and Decoupled Temporal Propagation for Multi-Modal Object Tracking

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • MDTrack is a novel multimodal object tracking framework that uses modality-aware fusion to handle infrared, event, depth, and RGB data by assigning dedicated experts to each modality for adaptive fusion.
  • It introduces decoupled temporal propagation with separate State Space Models for RGB and other modalities, enabling independent and more discriminative temporal feature representation.
  • Cross attention modules facilitate information exchange between modal streams and integrate temporally enriched features into the backbone network, improving temporal dynamics capture.
  • Extensive experiments show that MDTrack variants achieve state-of-the-art performance on five multimodal tracking benchmarks.
  • This approach addresses limitations of uniform fusion strategies and mixed token temporal propagation in existing multimodal trackers, advancing the field of multimodal object tracking technology.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09287 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:Exploring Modality-Aware Fusion and Decoupled Temporal Propagation for Multi-Modal Object Tracking

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Abstract:Most existing multimodal trackers adopt uniform fusion strategies, overlooking the inherent differences between modalities. Moreover, they propagate temporal information through mixed tokens, leading to entangled and less discriminative temporal representations. To address these limitations, we propose MDTrack, a novel framework for modality aware fusion and decoupled temporal propagation in multimodal object tracking. Specifically, for modality aware fusion, we allocate dedicated experts to each modality, including infrared, event, depth, and RGB, to process their respective representations. The gating mechanism within the Mixture of Experts dynamically selects the optimal experts based on the input features, enabling adaptive and modality specific fusion. For decoupled temporal propagation, we introduce two separate State Space Model structures to independently store and update the hidden states of the RGB and X modal streams, effectively capturing their distinct temporal information. To ensure synergy between the two temporal representations, we incorporate a set of cross attention modules between the input features of the two SSMs, facilitating implicit information exchange. The resulting temporally enriched features are then integrated into the backbone through another set of cross attention modules, enhancing MDTrack's ability to leverage temporal information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Both MDTrack S and MDTrack U achieve state of the art performance across five multimodal tracking benchmarks.
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09287 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09287v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09287
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Shilei Wang [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 07:10:05 UTC (421 KB)
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