AgentRVOS: Reasoning over Object Tracks for Zero-Shot Referring Video Object Segmentation
Organizations: KAIST AI
Abstract
Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment a target object throughout a video given a natural language query. Training-free methods for this task follow a common pipeline: a MLLM selects keyframes, grounds the referred object within those frames, and a video segmentation model propagates the results. While intuitive, this design asks the MLLM to make temporal decisions before any object-level evidence is available, limiting both reasoning quality and spatio-temporal coverage. To overcome this, we propose AgentRVOS, a training-free agentic pipeline built on the complementary strengths of SAM3 and a MLLM. Given a concept derived from the query, SAM3 provides reliable perception over the full spatio-temporal extent through generated mask tracks. The MLLM then identifies the target through query-grounded reasoning over this object-level evidence, iteratively pruning guided by SAM3's temporal existence information. Extensive experiments show that AgentRVOS achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free methods across multiple benchmarks, with consistent results across diverse MLLM backbones. Our project page is available at: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/AgentRVOS/.
Figures & tables
| Method | MLLM | MeViS | ReVOS | ReasonVOS | ||||||||||||
| Referring | Reasoning | Overall | ||||||||||||||
| Training-based Methods | ||||||||||||||||
| VideoLISA [ 3 ] | LLaVA-3.8B | 41.3 | 47.6 | 44.4 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 45.1 | 49.9 | 47.5 |
| VISA [ 38 ] | Chat-UniVi-13B | 41.8 | 47.1 | 44.5 | 55.6 | 59.1 | 57.4 | 42.0 | 46.7 | 44.3 | 48.8 | 52.9 | 50.9 | - | - | - |
| HyperSeg [ 34 ] | Mipha-3B | - | - | - | 56.0 | 60.9 | 58.5 | 50.2 | 55.8 | 53.0 | 53.1 | 58.4 | 55.7 | - | - | - |
| Component | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| (a) w/o Retry in Concept Extraction | 65.6 | 71.8 | 68.7 |
| (b) w/o Iteration in Iterative Spatio-temporal Pruning | 63.0 | 68.1 | 65.6 |
| (c) w/o Temporal Scope Pruning | 64.2 | 70.4 | 67.3 |
| AgentRVOS (Full Pipeline) | 67.1 | 73.6 | 70.3 |
| Max Iteration | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (No Retry) | 63.0 | 68.1 | 65.6 |
| 2 | 64.4 | 70.6 | 67.5 |
| 3 | 67.1 | 73.6 | 70.3 |
| 4 | 67.4 | 73.7 | 70.6 |
| # of Frames | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 64.6 | 70.7 | 67.6 |
| 16 | 67.1 | 73.6 | 70.3 |
| 32 | 65.6 | 72.1 | 68.8 |
| 64 | 64.9 | 71.5 | 68.2 |
| Iterations | Empty Mask Ratio (%) |
|---|---|
| CoT-RVS [ 16 ] | 12.0 |
| 1 | 4.9 |
| 2 | 4.1 ( -0.8 ) |
| 3 | 3.8 ( -1.1 ) |
Appendix figures & tables14 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Methods | Empty Mask Ratio (%) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAM3 [ 4 ] | 38.9 | 36.8 | 44.7 | 40.8 |
| AgentRVOS | 3.8 ( - 35.1 ) | 67.1 ( + 30.3 ) | 73.6 ( + 28.9 ) | 70.3 ( + 29.5 ) |
| Component | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| w/o Appearance Tool | 64.6 | 70.9 | 67.7 |
| AgentRVOS | 67.1 | 73.6 | 70.3 |
Referring Video Object Segmentation
Referring video object segmentation grounds language descriptions in video frames and produces temporally consistent masks for the described objects.
See all 42 papersVIRST: Video-Instructed Reasoning Assistant for SpatioTemporal Segmentation
VideoSEG-O3: A Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning Framework for Reasoning Video Object Segmentation
[SEG] during the RL stage, we introduce SEG-aware logit calibration, which integrates pixel-wise segmentation feedback directly into the token-level logits. Furthermore, we design a decoupled thinking trace to hierarchically decompose the reasoning process into temporal, spatial, and linguistic dimensions, and construct VTS-CoT, a specialized cold-start dataset featuring comprehensive reasoning trajectories. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/VideoSEG-O3.