Adaptively bypassing vision transformer blocks for efficient visual tracking

• Published in: Pattern recognition 2025-05, Vol.161, p.111278, Article 111278
• Main Authors: Yang, Xiangyang, Zeng, Dan, Wang, Xucheng, Wu, You, Ye, Hengzhou, Zhao, Qijun, Li, Shuiwang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adaptively bypassing; Efficient visual tracking; Pruning
• ISSN: 0031-3203
• DOI: 10.1016/j.patcog.2024.111278

Empowered by transformer-based models, visual tracking has advanced significantly. However, the slow speed of current trackers limits their applicability on devices with constrained computational resources. To address this challenge, we introduce ABTrack, an adaptive computation framework that adaptively bypassing transformer blocks for efficient visual tracking. The rationale behind ABTrack is rooted in the observation that semantic features or relations do not uniformly impact the tracking task across all abstraction levels. Instead, this impact varies based on the characteristics of the target and the scene it occupies. Consequently, disregarding insignificant semantic features or relations at certain abstraction levels may not significantly affect the tracking accuracy. We propose a Bypass Decision Module (BDM) to determine if a transformer block should be bypassed, which adaptively simplifies the architecture of ViTs and thus speeds up the inference process. To counteract the time cost incurred by the BDMs and further enhance the efficiency of ViTs, we introduce a novel ViT pruning method to reduce the dimension of the latent representation of tokens in each transformer block. Extensive experiments on multiple tracking benchmarks validate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is released at: https://github.com/xyyang317/ABTrack. •For semantic’s unbalanced tracking effect, we propose Bypass Decision Module.•To counteract BDM’s time, we propose a new ViT pruning to reduce token latent dim.•We introduce ABTrack, a tracker with favorable effectiveness and real-time capacity.