Event-Driven Refresh and Recurrence Memory to Reduce Stale Grounding in Referring Video Object Segmentation
Organizations: School of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea
Abstract
Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to produce a pixel-accurate mask sequence for an object specified by natural language. Sa2VA combines a multimodal large language model with SAM2 for grounded segmentation; however, its inference typically grounds the query from a small fixed set of initial keyframes and then relies on propagation. In long or dynamic videos, this can cause stale grounding and persistent false positives when the object composition changes (e.g., distractors enter or the target disappears/re-appears). We propose Event-Driven Refresh + Recurrence Memory (EDRRM), an enhancement that selectively re-invokes Sa2VA only at stable change points. EDRRM triggers refresh boundaries using an EMA-smoothed event score computed from tracking-derived cues (births/deaths and coarse composition/layout changes) with temporal constraints. A recurrence memory further retrieves anchor frames via CLIP similarity to re-condition the model on re-appearance events. Experiments on Ref-DAVIS17, MeViS, and ReVOS show that EDRRM achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-off relative to fixed-window and FrameDiff-SSIM baselines, maintaining comparable or superior J&F scores at substantially lower average refresh-call budgets and reducing false-positive failures. End-to-end runtime analysis further confirms that the overhead introduced by tracking, CLIP-based recurrence matching, and the identifiability gate remains modest relative to the dominant Sa2VA inference cost, thereby validating the efficiency of the proposed pipeline.
Figures & tables
| Parameter | Default | Role |
|---|---|---|
| ( wb ) | 1.0 | Weight for instance births term in the event score. |
| ( wd ) | 1.0 | Weight for instance deaths term in the event score. |
| ( wc ) | 0.5 | Weight for class-histogram change term in the event score. |
| ( wl ) | 0.5 | Weight for spatial layout-grid change term in the event score. |
| ( wr ) | 2.0 | Weight for recurrence-count term (strong trigger). |
| Config | thr_track | ema_alpha | event_thr | cooldown | min_chunk | sim_thr | ttl | recurrence_cooldown | pre_ctx | post_ctx | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MEVIS [ 7 ] | REVOS [ 8 ] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| edrrm-cfg-1 | 0.5 | 0.3 | 2.5 | 14 | 14 | 0.34 | 110 | 25 | 2 | 2 | 76.78 | 61.50 | 65.34 |
| edrrm-cfg-2 | 0.5 | 0.45 | 2.0 | 10 | 10 | 0.34 | 90 | 25 | 2 | 2 | 76.78 | 61.89 | 65.34 |
| edrrm-cfg-3 | 0.5 | 0.25 | 2.8 | 16 | 16 | 0.36 | 240 | 50 | 2 | 2 | 76.77 | 61.43 | 65.34 |
| edrrm-cfg-4 | 0.42 | 0.45 | 2.0 | 10 | 10 | 0.42 | 110 | 35 | 2 | 2 | 76.76 | 61.08 | 65.33 |
| edrrm-cfg-5 | 0.25 | 0.65 | 1.4 | 4 | 4 | 0.22 | 240 | 8 | 2 | 2 | 76.58 | 63.13 | 65.75 |
| edrrm-cfg-6 | 0.3 | 0.7 | 1.6 | 6 | 6 | 0.20 | 300 | 10 | 4 | 4 | 76.21 | 62.43 | 65.60 |
| Config | threshold | cooldown | min_length | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MEVIS [ 7 ] | REVOS [ 8 ] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ssim-cfg-1 | 0.95 | 4 | 4 | 76.83 | 62.48 | 65.25 |
| ssim-cfg-2 | 0.93 | 8 | 8 | 77.39 | 62.24 | 65.55 |
| ssim-cfg-3 | 0.90 | 8 | 12 | 76.85 | 61.76 | 65.41 |
| ssim-cfg-4 | 0.87 | 12 | 16 | 76.79 | 61.59 | 65.52 |
| ssim-cfg-5 | 0.82 | 20 | 32 | 76.47 | 59.85 | 65.43 |
| ssim-cfg-6 | 0.80 | 8 | 8 | 77.24 | 62.35 | 65.21 |
| Config | length | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MEVIS [ 7 ] | REVOS [ 8 ] |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| window-cfg-1 | 8 | 77.45 | 62.34 | 65.55 |
| window-cfg-2 | 16 | 76.53 | 55.25 | 65.88 |
| window-cfg-3 | 32 | 76.99 | 59.85 | 65.40 |
| window-cfg-4 | 64 | 75.94 | 58.92 | 65.02 |
| window-cfg-5 | 128 | 76.31 | 59.00 | 65.40 |
| Variant | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MeViS [ 7 ] | ReVOS [ 8 ] | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| J&F | #ref | J&F | #ref | J&F | #ref | |
| Sa2VA Original | 75.20 | 1.00 | 57.00 | 1.00 | 57.60 | 1.00 |
| EDRRM (Ours) | 76.84 | 3.85 | 63.13 | 7.89 | 66.16 | 2.22 |
| w/o recurrence memory | 75.97 | 3.53 | 61.79 | 5.91 | 66.14 | 1.59 |
| w/o identifiability gate | 76.80 | 3.82 | 63.23 | 7.89 | 66.69 | 2.17 |
| w/o anchor injection | 76.24 | 3.82 | 62.77 | 7.22 | 66.14 | 2.22 |
| thr_track | Tracking Quality | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MeViS [ 7 ] | ReVOS [ 8 ] | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| J&F | #ref | J&F | #ref | J&F | #ref | ||
| 0.25 | Very noisy | 76.59 | 3.25 | 62.53 | 6.44 | 65.96 | 2.76 |
| 0.30 | Noisy | 76.53 | 3.21 | 61.99 | 6.82 | 65.57 | 2.49 |
| 0.42 | Strict | 76.76 | 1.78 | 61.21 | 4.08 | 65.34 | 1.02 |
| 0.50 | Very Strict | 76.78 | 1.25 | 61.61 | 2.46 | 65.34 | 1.05 |
| Dataset | Total Segments | Gate “no” | Gate “no” Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| DAVIS | 934 | 192 | 20.56% |
| MeViS | 6224 | 1383 | 22.22% |
| ReVOS | 6691 | 1713 | 25.60% |
| Method | Refresh Rate Budget | Segment Length (Avg) | Segment Length (Min/Max) | Peak budget-conditioned J&F | ||||||||
| DAVIS | MEVIS | REVOS | DAVIS | MEVIS | REVOS | DAVIS | MEVIS | REVOS | DAVIS | MEVIS | REVOS | |
| Window | 15 | 14 | 17 | 7.58 | 7.52 | 6.72 | 4/8 | 4/8 | 3/7 | 78.78 | 64.03 | 66.38 |
| SSIM | 10 | 14 | 17 | 8.04 | 7.83 | 7.85 | 4/9 | 5/8 | 4/9 | 78.66 | 63.78 | 66.37 |
| Ours | 10 | 10 | 13 | 36.37 | 9.97 | 13.79 | 30/44 | 5/18 | 11/16 | 82.60 | 75.22 | 67.25 |
| Budget (avg #calls) | Method | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MeViS [ 7 ] | ReVOS [ 8 ] |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Window | – | – | 67.37 |
| SSIM | 93.64 | – | 64.71 | |
| EDRRM | 77.55 | 66.08 | 67.06 | |
| 4 | Window | – | 63.50 | 66.03 |
| SSIM | 78.66 | – | 66.55 | |
| EDRRM | 78.49 | 58.62 | 66.30 |
| Component | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MeViS [ 7 ] | ReVOS [ 8 ] |
|---|---|---|---|
| MASA Tracking | 18.73 | 18.97 | 8.46 |
| Event Score | 0.18 | 0.64 | 0.19 |
| CLIP Recurrence | 0.17 | 0.63 | 0.18 |
| Identifiability Gate | 2.74 | 6.38 | 1.78 |
| Sa2VA Inference | 21.66 | 24.93 | 9.26 |
| EDRRM Total | 43.48 | 51.55 | 19.87 |
| Method/Model | Tuning | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MEVIS [ 7 ] | REVOS [ 8 ] | Mean |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VideoLISA-3.8B | - | 68.80 | 44.40 | - | 56.60 |
| VISA-13B | - | 70.40 | 44.50 | 50.90 | 55.27 |
| Sa2VA-1B | - | 72.30 | 50.80 | 47.60 | 56.90 |
| Sa2VA-4B | - | 73.80 | 52.10 | 53.20 | 59.70 |
| Sa2VA-8B | - | 75.20 | 57.00 | 57.60 | 63.27 |
| Sa2VA-26B | - | 77.00 | 57.30 | 58.40 | 64.23 |
| Method/Model | Tuning | DAVIS [ 5 ] | MEVIS [ 7 ] | REVOS [ 8 ] | Mean |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VideoLISA-3.8B | - | 68.80 | 44.40 | - | 56.60 |
| VISA-13B | - | 70.40 | 44.50 | 50.90 | 55.27 |
| Sa2VA-1B | - | 72.30 | 50.80 | 47.60 | 56.90 |
| Sa2VA-4B | - | 73.80 | 52.10 | 53.20 | 59.70 |
| Sa2VA-8B | - | 75.20 | 57.00 | 57.60 | 63.27 |
| Sa2VA-26B | - | 77.00 | 57.30 | 58.40 | 64.23 |