R1-Track: Direct Application of MLLMs to Visual Object Tracking via Reinforcement Learning

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.