acceptodds
Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

State Evolution Awareness for Category-agnostic 3D Point Cloud Tracking

Xiantao Hu, Ying Tai, Jinxia Xie, Bineng Zhong, Guangwei Gao, Jianjun Qian, Jian Yang

Abstract

Existing 3D point cloud tracking methods have not fully exploited temporal information in point cloud sequences, making it difficult to effectively capture the continuous evolution of target states and thereby limiting tracking stability in scenarios with large cross-category geometric variation. To address this issue, we propose TETrack3D, a framework for category-agnostic 3D point cloud tracking. The core idea of TETrack3D is to elevate temporal information from an auxiliary cue to an explicit learning constraint for cross-frame association. Specifically, we introduce a historical feature reuse mechanism to preserve and reuse target-related features accumulated over multiple frames, enabling the association process in the current frame to access richer and finer-grained historical context. We further design a state evolution supervision module, which guides the model to learn temporally consistent target motion patterns from historical observations by predicting future target states. In addition, to alleviate cross-frame feature drift caused by target-state changes in point cloud sequences, we propose a temporal distribution alignment strategy based on optimal transport theory, which constrains target features across adjacent frames at the distribution level and improves the stability of temporal target modeling. Extensive comparative experiments on KITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo demonstrate that explicitly modeling the target-state evolution process effectively improves the localization robustness of 3D object tracking.

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