{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/r1-track-direct-application-of-mllms-to","title":"R1-Track: Direct Application of MLLMs to Visual Object Tracking via Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"2506.21980","date":"2025-06-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Biao Wang","Wenwen Li"],"abstract":"Visual single object tracking aims to continuously localize and estimate the scale of a target in subsequent video frames, given only its initial state in the first frame. This task has traditionally been framed as a template matching problem, evolving through major phases including correlation filters, two-stream networks, and one-stream networks with significant progress achieved. However, these methods typically require explicit classification and regression modeling, depend on supervised training with large-scale datasets, and are limited to the single task of tracking, lacking flexibility. In recent years, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly. Open-source models like Qwen2.5-VL, a flagship MLLMs with strong foundational capabilities, demonstrate excellent performance in grounding tasks. This has spurred interest in applying such models directly to visual tracking. However, experiments reveal that Qwen2.5-VL struggles with template matching between image pairs (i.e., tracking tasks). Inspired by deepseek-R1, we fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL using the group relative policy optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning method on a small-scale dataset with a rule-based reward function. The resulting model, R1-Track, achieved notable performance on the GOT-10k benchmark. R1-Track supports flexible initialization via bounding boxes or text descriptions while retaining most of the original model's general capabilities. And we further discuss potential improvements for R1-Track. This rough technical report summarizes our findings as of May 2025.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21980v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21980v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"r1-track-direct-application-of-mllms-to","repo_url":"https://github.com/wangbiao2/r1-track","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"object-tracking","task_name":"Object Tracking"},{"task_slug":"template-matching","task_name":"Template Matching"},{"task_slug":"visual-object-tracking","task_name":"Visual Object Tracking"},{"task_slug":"visual-tracking","task_name":"Visual Tracking"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}