TAPNext++: What's Next for Tracking Any Point (TAP)?

Abstract

Tracking-Any-Point (TAP) models aim to track any point through a video which is a crucial task in AR/XR and robotics applications. The recently introduced TAPNext approach proposes an end-to-end, recurrent transformer architecture to track points frame-by-frame in a purely online fashion -- demonstrating competitive performance at minimal latency. However, we show that TAPNext struggles with longer video sequences and also frequently fails to re-detect query points that reappear after being occluded or leaving the frame. In this work, we present TAPNext++, a model that tracks points in sequences that are orders of magnitude longer while preserving the low memory and compute footprint of the architecture. We train the recurrent video transformer using several data-driven solutions, including training on long 1024-frame sequences enabled by sequence parallelism techniques. We highlight that re-detection performance is a blind spot in the current literature and introduce a new metric, Re-Detection Average Jaccard ($AJ_{RD}$), to explicitly evaluate tracking on re-appearing points. To improve re-detection of points, we introduce tailored geometric augmentations, such as periodic roll that simulates point re-entries, and supervising occluded points. We demonstrate that recurrent transformers can be substantially improved for point tracking and set a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks. Model and code can be found at https://tap-next-plus-plus.github.io.