Template-Search Domain Adaptation via Multi-Stage Feature Alignment for Cross-Modal Object Tracking

arXiv:2609.38637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual object tracking typically assumes that the initial template and subsequent search frames share the same sensing modality. In practice, sensor availability or operation may change over time, creating a substantial representation gap between template and search frames. Unlike conventional multi-modal tracking where paired modalities are simultaneously available, cross-modal tracking requires localization when template and search frames originate from different active modalities. Accordingly, we introduce TSDA-Track, a Template-Search Domain Adaptation framework to reduce modality discrepancy during training. We investigate two feature alignment strategies. Pre-AFA TSDA-Track applies adversarial alignment before transformer's template-search interaction to suppress modality-specific bias. Enc-CFA TSDA-Track applies contrastive alignment to encoder representations after interaction to strengthen target-level cross-modal correspondence. Both variants retain a shared inference pipeline without modality-specific branches. Experiments on LasHeR, and zero-shot evaluations on RGBT234 and GTOT under multiple cross-modal protocols demonstrate improvements over representative state-of-the-art trackers. For instance, under the modality-switch protocol on RGBT234, Pre-AFA TSDA-Track achieves an SR/PR of 43.2/56.0, compared with 36.8/50.0 for ToMP-101 baseline. In addition, a study on Anti-UAV-024 further verifies the applicability of TSDA-Track to aerial tracking. Our study highlights the effectiveness of feature alignment domain adaptation for cross-modal tracking.