In this paper, a new variational Bayesian adaptive cubature Kalman filter (VBACKF) is proposed for nonlinear state estimation. Although the conventional VBACKF performs better than cubature Kalman filtering (CKF) in solving nonlinear systems with time-varying measurement noise, its performance may degrade due to the uncertainty of the system model. To overcome this drawback, a multilayer feed-forward neural network (MFNN) is used to aid the conventional VBACKF, generalizing it to attain higher estimation accuracy and robustness. In the proposed neural-network-aided variational Bayesian adaptive cubature Kalman filter (NN-VBACKF), the MFNN is used to turn the state estimation of the VBACKF adaptively, and it is used for both state estimation and in the online training paradigm simultaneously. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, it is compared with CKF and VBACKF via target tracking problems. The simulation results demonstrate that the estimation accuracy and robustness of the proposed method are better than those of the CKF and VBACKF.