AdaTracker: Learning Adaptive In-Context Policy for Cross-Embodiment Active Visual Tracking

arXiv cs.RO / 4/23/2026

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Key Points

  • AdaTracker tackles the challenge of active visual tracking across diverse robots by using a single unified model instead of training separate models per robot embodiment.
  • The approach infers embodiment-specific physical constraints from prior history via an Embodiment Context Encoder, then uses that context to dynamically modulate a context-aware policy for control action selection.
  • It targets zero-shot adaptation to unseen embodiments by ensuring the inferred context is accurate and temporally consistent through two auxiliary objectives.
  • Experiments in both simulation and real-world settings show AdaTracker improves performance over state-of-the-art methods in cross-embodiment generalization, sample efficiency, and adaptation without additional training.

Abstract

Realizing active visual tracking with a single unified model across diverse robots is challenging, as the physical constraints and motion dynamics vary drastically from one platform to another. Existing approaches typically train separate models for each embodiment, leading to poor scalability and limited generalization. To address this, we propose AdaTracker, an adaptive in-context policy learning framework that robustly tracks targets on diverse robot morphologies. Our key insight is to explicitly model embodiment-specific constraints through an Embodiment Context Encoder, which infers embodiment-specific constraints from history. This contextual representation dynamically modulates a Context-Aware Policy, enabling it to infer optimal control actions for unseen embodiments in a zero-shot manner. To enhance robustness, we introduce two auxiliary objectives to ensure accurate context identification and temporal consistency. Experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that AdaTracker significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-embodiment generalization, sample efficiency, and zero-shot adaptation.