UTPTrack: Towards Simple and Unified Token Pruning for Visual Tracking

摘要

One-stream Transformer-based trackers achieve advanced performance in visual object tracking suffer from significant computational overhead that hinders real-time deployment. While token pruning offers a path to efficiency, a critical limitation persists: no existing work performs pruning jointly across all three critical components--the search region, dynamic template, and static template. This isolation overlooks interdependencies, yielding suboptimal pruning and degraded accuracy. To address this, we introduce UTPTrack, a simple and Unified Token Pruning framework that, for the first time, jointly compresses all three components. UTPTrack employs an attention-guided, token type-aware strategy to holistically model redundancy, a design that seamlessly supports unified tracking across multi-modal and language-guided tasks within a single model. Comprehensive evaluations on 10 benchmarks demonstrate that UTPTrack achieves a new state-of-the-art in the accuracy-efficiency trade-off for pruning-based trackers, pruning 65.4% of vision tokens in RGB-based tracking and 67.5% in unified tracking while preserving 99.7% and 100.5% of baseline performance, respectively. This strong performance across both RGB and multimodal scenarios underlines its potential as a robust foundation for future research in efficient visual tracking.