Out of Sight, Out of Track: Adversarial Attacks on Propagation-based Multi-Object Trackers via Query State Manipulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00452v1
• Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:04:45 GMT
• Title: Out of Sight, Out of Track: Adversarial Attacks on Propagation-based Multi-Object Trackers via Query State Manipulation
• Abstract summary: We present FADE, a novel attack framework designed to exploit TBP vulnerabilities.<n>FADE employs two attack strategies targeting core TBP mechanisms.<n>Experiments on MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks demonstrate that FADE is highly effective against state-of-the-art TBP trackers.
• Score: 19.165721855507247
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recent Tracking-by-Query-Propagation (TBP) methods have advanced Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) by enabling end-to-end (E2E) pipelines with long-range temporal modeling. However, this reliance on query propagation introduces unexplored architectural vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. We present FADE, a novel attack framework designed to exploit these specific vulnerabilities. FADE employs two attack strategies targeting core TBP mechanisms: (i) Temporal Query Flooding: Generates spurious temporally consistent track queries to exhaust the tracker's limited query budget, forcing it to terminate valid tracks. (ii) Temporal Memory Corruption: Directly attacks the query updater's memory by severing temporal links via state de-correlation and erasing the learned feature identity of matched tracks. Furthermore, we introduce a differentiable pipeline to optimize these attacks for physical-world realizability by leveraging simulations of advanced perception sensor spoofing. Experiments on MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks demonstrate that FADE is highly effective against state-of-the-art TBP trackers, causing significant identity switches and track terminations.

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