Prior Knowledge-Driven Hybrid Prompter Learning for RGB-Event Tracking

Event data can asynchronously capture variations in light intensity, thereby implicitly providing valuable complementary cues for RGB-Event tracking. Existing methods typically employ a direct interaction mechanism to fuse RGB and event data. However, due to differences in imaging mechanisms, the representational disparity between these two data types is not fixed, which can lead to tracking failures in certain challenging scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel prior knowledge-driven hybrid prompter learning framework for RGB-Event tracking. Specifically, we develop a frame-event hybrid prompter that leverages prior tracking knowledge from the foundation model as intermediate modal support to mitigate the heterogeneity between RGB and event data. By leveraging its rich prior tracking knowledge, the intermediate modal reduces the gap between the dense RGB and sparse event data interactions, effectively guiding complementary learning between modalities. Meanwhile, to mitigate the internal learning disparities between the lightweight hybrid prompter and the deep transformer model, we introduce a pseudo-prompt learning strategy that lies between full fine-tuning and partial fine-tuning. This strategy adopts a divide-and-conquer approach to assign different learning rates to modules with distinct functions, effectively reducing the dominant influence of RGB information in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments conducted on two public RGB-Event tracking datasets show that the proposed HPL outperforms state-of-the-art tracking methods, achieving exceptional performance.