RGB-Event single object tracking (SOT) aims to leverage the merits of RGB and event data to achieve higher performance. However, existing frameworks focus on exploring complementary appearance information within multi-modal data, and struggle to address the association problem of targets and distractors in the temporal domain using motion information from the event stream. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) philosophy into RGB-E SOT to keep track of targets as well as distractors by using both RGB and event data, thereby improving the robustness of the tracker. Specifically, an appearance model is employed to predict the initial candidates. Subsequently, the initially predicted tracking results, in combination with the RGB-E features, are encoded into appearance and motion embeddings, respectively. Furthermore, a Spatial-Temporal Transformer Encoder is proposed to model the spatial-temporal relationships and learn discriminative features for each candidate through guidance of the appearance-motion embeddings. Simultaneously, a Dual-Branch Transformer Decoder is designed to adopt such motion and appearance information for candidate matching, thus distinguishing between targets and distractors. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on all the datasets tested.

RGB-Event single object tracking (SOT) aims to leverage the merits of RGB and event data to achieve higher performance. However, existing frameworks focus on exploring complementary appearance information within multi-modal data, and struggle to address the association problem of targets and distractors in the temporal domain using motion information from the event stream. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) philosophy into RGB-E SOT to keep track of targets as well as distractors by using both RGB and event data, thereby improving the robustness of the tracker. Specifically, an appearance model is employed to predict the initial candidates. Subsequently, the initially predicted tracking results, in combination with the RGB-E features, are encoded into appearance and motion embeddings, respectively. Furthermore, a Spatial-Temporal Transformer Encoder is proposed to model the spatial-temporal relationships and learn discriminative features for each candidate through guidance of the appearance-motion embeddings.

Recent advances in vision-and-language modeling have seen the development of Transformer architectures that achieve remarkable performance on multimodal reasoning tasks. Yet, the exact capabilities of these black-box models are still poorly understood. While much of previous work has focused on studying their ability to learn meaning at the word-level, their ability to track syntactic dependencies between words has received less attention. We take a first step in closing this gap by creating a new multimodal task targeted at evaluating understanding of predicate-noun dependencies in a controlled setup. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art models and find that their performance on the task varies considerably, with some models performing relatively well and others at chance level. In an effort to explain this variability, our analyses indicate that the quality (and not only sheer quantity) of pretraining data is essential. Additionally, the best performing models leverage fine-grained multimodal pretraining objectives in addition to the standard image-text matching objectives. This study highlights that targeted and controlled evaluations are a crucial step for a precise and rigorous test of the multimodal knowledge of vision-and-language models.

In active visual tracking, it is notoriously difficult when distracting objects appear, as distractors often mislead the tracker by occluding the target or bringing a confusing appearance. To address this issue, we propose a mixed cooperative-competitive multi-agent game, where a target and multiple distractors form a collaborative team to play against a tracker and make it fail to follow. Through learning in our game, diverse distracting behaviors of the distractors naturally emerge, thereby exposing the tracker's weakness, which helps enhance the distraction-robustness of the tracker. For effective learning, we then present a bunch of practical methods, including a reward function for distractors, a cross-modal teacher-student learning strategy, and a recurrent attention mechanism for the tracker. The experimental results show that our tracker performs desired distraction-robust active visual tracking and can be well generalized to unseen environments. We also show that the multi-agent game can be used to adversarially test the robustness of trackers.

A model connecting visual tracking and saliency has recently been proposed. This model is based on the saliency hypothesis for tracking which postulates that tracking is achieved by the top-down tuning, based on target features, of discriminant center-surround saliency mechanisms over time. In this work, we identify three main predictions that must hold if the hypothesis were true: 1) tracking reliability should be larger for salient than for non-salient targets, 2) tracking reliability should have a dependence on the defining variables of saliency, namely feature contrast and distractor heterogeneity, and must replicate the dependence of saliency on these variables, and 3) saliency and tracking can be implemented with common low level neural mechanisms. We confirm that the first two predictions hold by reporting results from a set of human behavior studies on the connection between saliency and tracking. We also show that the third prediction holds by constructing a common neurophysiologically plausible architecture that can computationally solve both saliency and tracking. This architecture is fully compliant with the standard physiological models of V1 and MT, and with what is known about attentional control in area LIP, while explaining the results of the human behavior experiments.

Survival in the natural world demands the selection of relevant visual cues to rapidly and reliably guide attention towards prey and predators in cluttered environments. We investigate whether our visual system selects cues that guide search in an optimal manner. We formally obtain the optimal cue selection strategy by maximizing the signal to noise ratio (SN R) between a search target and surrounding distractors. This optimal strategy successfully accounts for several phenomena in visual search behavior, including the effect of target-distractor discriminability, uncertainty in target's features, distractor heterogeneity, and linear separability. Furthermore, the theory generates a new prediction, which we verify through psychophysical experiments with human subjects. Our results provide direct experimental evidence that humans select visual cues so as to maximize SN R between the targets and surrounding clutter.

Experimental data indicate that norepinephrine is critically involved in aspects of vigilance and attention. Previously, we considered the function of this neuromodulatory system on a time scale of minutes and longer, and suggested that it signals global uncertainty arising from gross changes in environmental contingencies. However, norepinephrine is also known to be activated phasically by familiar stimuli in welllearned tasks. Here, we extend our uncertainty-based treatment of norepinephrine to this phasic mode, proposing that it is involved in the detection and reaction to state uncertainty within a task. This role of norepinephrine can be understood through the metaphor of neural interrupts.

Experimental data indicate that norepinephrine is critically involved in aspects of vigilance and attention. Previously, we considered the function of this neuromodulatory system on a time scale of minutes and longer, and suggested that it signals global uncertainty arising from gross changes in environmental contingencies. However, norepinephrine is also known to be activated phasically by familiar stimuli in welllearned tasks. Here, we extend our uncertainty-based treatment of norepinephrine to this phasic mode, proposing that it is involved in the detection and reaction to state uncertainty within a task. This role of norepinephrine can be understood through the metaphor of neural interrupts.