GateMOT: Q-Gated Attention for Dense Object Tracking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lv, Mingjin, Liu, Zelin, Shao, Feifei, Chen, Yi-Ping Phoebe, Yu, Junqing, Yang, Wei, Song, Zikai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lv, Mingjin
Liu, Zelin
Shao, Feifei
Chen, Yi-Ping Phoebe
Yu, Junqing
Yang, Wei
Song, Zikai
author_facet Lv, Mingjin
Liu, Zelin
Shao, Feifei
Chen, Yi-Ping Phoebe
Yu, Junqing
Yang, Wei
Song, Zikai
contents While large models demonstrate the strong representational power of vanilla attention, this core mechanism cannot be directly applied to Dense Object Tracking: its quadratic all-to-all interactions are computationally prohibitive for dense motion estimation on high-resolution features. This mismatch prevents Dense Object Tracking from fully leveraging attention-based modeling in crowded and occlusion-heavy scenes. To address this challenge, we introduce GateMOT, an online tracking framework centered on Q-Gated Attention (Q-Attention), an efficient and spatially aware attention variant. Our key idea is to repurpose the Query from a similarity-conditioning term into a learnable gating unit. This Gating-Query (Gating-Q) produces a probabilistic gate that modulates Key features in an element-wise manner, enabling explicit relevance selection instead of costly global aggregation. Built on this mechanism, parallel Q-Attention heads transform one shared feature map into task-specific yet consistent representations for detection, motion, and re-identification, yielding a tightly coupled multi-task decoder with linear-complexity gating operations. GateMOT achieves state-of-the-art HOTA of 48.4, MOTA of 67.8, and IDF1 of 64.5 on BEE24, and demonstrates strong performance on additional Dense Object Tracking benchmarks. These results show that Q-Attention is a simple, effective, and transferable building block for attention-based tracking in dense tracking scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_26353
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GateMOT: Q-Gated Attention for Dense Object Tracking
Lv, Mingjin
Liu, Zelin
Shao, Feifei
Chen, Yi-Ping Phoebe
Yu, Junqing
Yang, Wei
Song, Zikai
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
While large models demonstrate the strong representational power of vanilla attention, this core mechanism cannot be directly applied to Dense Object Tracking: its quadratic all-to-all interactions are computationally prohibitive for dense motion estimation on high-resolution features. This mismatch prevents Dense Object Tracking from fully leveraging attention-based modeling in crowded and occlusion-heavy scenes. To address this challenge, we introduce GateMOT, an online tracking framework centered on Q-Gated Attention (Q-Attention), an efficient and spatially aware attention variant. Our key idea is to repurpose the Query from a similarity-conditioning term into a learnable gating unit. This Gating-Query (Gating-Q) produces a probabilistic gate that modulates Key features in an element-wise manner, enabling explicit relevance selection instead of costly global aggregation. Built on this mechanism, parallel Q-Attention heads transform one shared feature map into task-specific yet consistent representations for detection, motion, and re-identification, yielding a tightly coupled multi-task decoder with linear-complexity gating operations. GateMOT achieves state-of-the-art HOTA of 48.4, MOTA of 67.8, and IDF1 of 64.5 on BEE24, and demonstrates strong performance on additional Dense Object Tracking benchmarks. These results show that Q-Attention is a simple, effective, and transferable building block for attention-based tracking in dense tracking scenarios.
title GateMOT: Q-Gated Attention for Dense Object Tracking
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26353