Sparse-Dense Mixture of Experts Adapter for Multi-Modal Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Sparse-Dense Mixture of Experts Adapter framework for multi-modal tracking, improving multi-modal feature representation and high-order correlation modeling with efficient parameter usage.

Contribution

The paper proposes a unified PEFT framework with a sparse-dense MoE and a Gram-based hypergraph fusion for enhanced multi-modal tracking performance.

Findings

Achieves superior results on multiple multi-modal tracking benchmarks.

Effectively models modality-specific and shared information.

Enhances high-order multi-modal feature fusion.

Abstract

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques, such as prompts and adapters, are widely used in multi-modal tracking because they alleviate issues of full-model fine-tuning, including time inefficiency, high resource consumption, parameter storage burden, and catastrophic forgetting. However, due to cross-modal heterogeneity, most existing PEFT-based methods struggle to effectively represent multi-modal features within a unified framework with shared parameters. To address this problem, we propose a novel Sparse-Dense Mixture of Experts Adapter (SDMoEA) framework for PEFT-based multi-modal tracking under a unified model structure. Specifically, we design an SDMoE module as the multi-modal adapter to model modality-specific and shared information efficiently. SDMoE consists of a sparse MoE and a dense-shared MoE: the former captures modality-specific information, while the latter models shared cross-modal information. Furthermore, to overcome limitations of existing tracking methods in modeling high-order correlations during multi-level multi-modal fusion, we introduce a Gram-based Semantic Alignment Hypergraph Fusion (GSAHF) module. It first employs Gram matrices for cross-modal semantic alignment, ensuring that the constructed hypergraph accurately reflects semantic similarity and high-order dependencies between modalities. The aligned features are then integrated into the hypergraph structure to exploit its ability to model high-order relationships, enabling deep fusion of multi-level multi-modal information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with other PEFT approaches on several multi-modal tracking benchmarks, including LasHeR, RGBT234, VTUAV, VisEvent, COESOT, DepthTrack, and VOT-RGBD2022.