InstructTrack: Language-Guided Multi-Object Tracking with Semantic-Aware Association

Locating and continuously tracking individuals in videos using natural-language descriptions is essential for human-AI collaboration, surveillance analytics, and video-based question answering. However, there are still three gaps: (i) although existing methods can reliably associate trajectories in most scenarios, they still fail to capture semantic understanding; (ii) large vision-language models (VLMs) grasp semantics but lack temporal identity stability; and (iii) person re-identification (ReID) excels at identity discrimination but ignores linguistic intent and often discards contextual cues. We present InstructTrack, an instruction-driven tracking agent that bridges these gaps. Using VLM backbone as a semantic hub, the video frame is parsed to localize the referred target, decide whether contextual cues are required, and extract initial semantic embeddings. The system then aligns VLM proposals with a lightweight detector via Hungarian matching to initialize or update track IDs. Subsequently, a context-gated ReID head learns identity and instruction relevant context embeddings and fuses them under language control; a tailored triplet objective jointly optimizes identity and context consistency. Integrated into an online MOT loop, InstructTrack delivers instruction-controllable, long-term person tracking, and single-video ReID. On MOT17 and MOT20, our method outperforms strong online baselines, achieving HOTA 68.4/68.4 and IDF1 86.1/81.6 while halving identity switches.