ProMoT: Progressive Prompting of Modality and Temporal Dynamics for RGB-T Tracking

RGB-T tracking benefits from the complementary nature of RGB and TIR modalities, yet their relative reliability for target localization often shifts over time. Most existing trackers fail to adapt to such modality and temporal dynamics in a unified and effective manner, resulting in target representations that are neither discriminative nor temporally consistent. In this paper, we propose ProMoT, a novel tracking framework that jointly integrates cross-modal and temporal cues into a progressive prompting process, enabling continuous retrieval of target-aware representations. Specifically, we design an adaptive target query generator (QueryGen), which selectively aggregates informative spatio-temporal cues from diverse ghost representations through the dynamic sparse ghost fusion mechanism, thereby enabling the generation of target-aware queries. To further preserve fine-grained, temporally consistent target cues, we introduce a high-order contextual prompt updater (PromptUpdater), which encodes high-order cross-modal representations from current and previous frames. These prompts establish the compact and discriminative inter-frame context to not only refine the current frame’s features but also guide target localization in future frames. All components are built upon a parameter-shared backbone for RGB and TIR inputs, forming our complete ProMoT framework. Extensive experiments on both complete and missing modality RGB-T tracking benchmarks show that ProMoT consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance while balancing efficiency.