QueST: Persistent Queries as Semantic Monitors for Drift Suppression in Long-Horizon Tracking

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Main Authors: Anand, Mayank, Saqlain, Mohammad, Mahajan, Kyan, Shukla, Priya, Nandi, Gora Chand, Melnik, Andrew
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Anand, Mayank
Saqlain, Mohammad
Mahajan, Kyan
Shukla, Priya
Nandi, Gora Chand
Melnik, Andrew
author_facet Anand, Mayank
Saqlain, Mohammad
Mahajan, Kyan
Shukla, Priya
Nandi, Gora Chand
Melnik, Andrew
contents Tracking points in videos is typically formulated as frame-to-frame correspondence, where each point is matched locally to the next frame. While this works over short horizons, errors accumulate under articulation, occlusion, and viewpoint change, leading to silent semantic drift that existing trackers cannot detect or correct. In this work, we revisit long-horizon tracking from a monitoring perspective and introduce QueST, a monitoring-by-design framework that treats interaction-relevant entities as persistent semantic queries rather than transient point tracks. Instead of local propagation, each query attends globally over spatio-temporal video features at every time-step, providing a stable semantic anchor across time. We further constrain query trajectories with lightweight 3D physical grounding, using geometric plausibility to suppress unbounded drift under occlusion. We evaluate QueST on long-horizon articulated sequences from PartNet-Mobility in SAPIEN and compare against RAFT-3D, CoTracker, and TAP-Net. QueST substantially reduces terminal drift achieving a 67.7% Absolute Point Error (APE) improvement over TAP-Net while better preserving identity over extended horizons. Our results show that embedding semantic monitoring directly into perception enables more reliable long-horizon tracking under distribution shift.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09513
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QueST: Persistent Queries as Semantic Monitors for Drift Suppression in Long-Horizon Tracking
Anand, Mayank
Saqlain, Mohammad
Mahajan, Kyan
Shukla, Priya
Nandi, Gora Chand
Melnik, Andrew
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Tracking points in videos is typically formulated as frame-to-frame correspondence, where each point is matched locally to the next frame. While this works over short horizons, errors accumulate under articulation, occlusion, and viewpoint change, leading to silent semantic drift that existing trackers cannot detect or correct. In this work, we revisit long-horizon tracking from a monitoring perspective and introduce QueST, a monitoring-by-design framework that treats interaction-relevant entities as persistent semantic queries rather than transient point tracks. Instead of local propagation, each query attends globally over spatio-temporal video features at every time-step, providing a stable semantic anchor across time. We further constrain query trajectories with lightweight 3D physical grounding, using geometric plausibility to suppress unbounded drift under occlusion. We evaluate QueST on long-horizon articulated sequences from PartNet-Mobility in SAPIEN and compare against RAFT-3D, CoTracker, and TAP-Net. QueST substantially reduces terminal drift achieving a 67.7% Absolute Point Error (APE) improvement over TAP-Net while better preserving identity over extended horizons. Our results show that embedding semantic monitoring directly into perception enables more reliable long-horizon tracking under distribution shift.
title QueST: Persistent Queries as Semantic Monitors for Drift Suppression in Long-Horizon Tracking
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09513