GuidedSAM-Plume: An Expert-Guided Segmentation Framework for Volcanic Plumes

Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) provides a strong frozen backbone for concept-prompted segmentation, but applying it directly to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) is inefficient: full-resolution decoding is typically run over the entire dataset vocabulary, whereas each image contains only a small active subset of classes. We introduce ActiveSAM, a training-free inference framework that turns SAM 3 into an active-vocabulary segmenter. ActiveSAM first canonicalizes and expands class prompts, then uses evidence-proportional grounding to estimate an image-conditioned active set from a low-resolution presence preview. Only retained prompts receive full-resolution mask prediction, using bucketed prompt multiplexing with the frozen SAM 3 decoder. The preview stage uses only class-presence evidence and skips unnecessary segmentation-head computation. To resolve overlapping concept responses, exclusive concept decoding compares each pixel's joint score vector with class signatures estimated once per vocabulary from unlabeled images. ActiveSAM requires no weight updates, no oracle class-presence labels and no per-dataset hyperparameter tuning. Across eight OVSS benchmarks, ActiveSAM improves the speed-accuracy tradeoff of training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, outperforming the current state-of-the-art SegEarth-OV3 by +2.1 mIoU on average while running much faster, with 7.3-12.2x speedups on large-vocabulary datasets. ActiveSAM also achieves the highest accuracy under image corruptions that simulate real-world distribution shift, making it well-suited for deployment in noisy-input domains such as autonomous driving and embodied AI. Code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ActiveSAM

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) in remote sensing images aims to segment categories beyond a fixed label space. Recent SAM 3-based methods provide a promising training-free foundation, yet three key issues remain: (1) a single class-name prompt lacks sufficient semantic coverage for complex remote sensing categories; (2) expanding each category into multiple prompts introduces redundant online text encoding; and (3) directly aggregating multiple prompt responses propagates noisy activations into the final prediction. To address these issues, we propose ProC-SAM3, which calibrates SAM 3's prompt interface for remote sensing OVSS from three complementary aspects. First, we construct an offline prompt pool where a Category Matcher groups MLLM-generated candidates into per-category sets, and Expansion Constraints further refine each set using category-specific prior knowledge. Second, the resulting text embeddings are cached and reused across all test images, eliminating repeated text encoding. Third, we introduce Presence-Guided Residual Fusion to gate unreliable decoder outputs by prompt presence and confidence, followed by peak-preserving class aggregation that retains fine-grained activations for small and sparse objects. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that ProC-SAM3 achieves an average mIoU of 56.1%, outperforming the previous best training-free method by 3.9 percentage points. Code will be available at https://github.com/YanghuiSong/ProC-SAM3.

Open-vocabulary segmentation identifies and segments objects from arbitrary textual descriptions. SAM 3 supports noun-phrase-guided segmentation and achieves competitive open-vocabulary performance through exhaustive vocabulary traversal, yet suffers from prohibitive computational overhead as target categories scale. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Open-Vocabulary segmentation framework with SAM 3 (EOVSAM), which adapts SAM 3 for single-pass prediction. EOVSAM removes prompt conditioning to turn SAM 3 into an efficient mask generator and introduces a new Attentional Aggregation strategy to optimize open-vocabulary classification end-to-end. This formulation avoids the multi-stage pipelines and post-processing heuristics commonly used by existing methods, while mitigating the closed-set collapse that can arise when classification is optimized directly. EOVSAM consistently improves segmentation accuracy over vanilla SAM 3 on all evaluated datasets and accelerates inference by up to 338$\times$. Furthermore, EOVSAM maintains high accuracy at lower resolutions while achieving even more remarkable inference speeds. Experiments on standard semantic and panoptic segmentation benchmarks show that EOVSAM combines competitive or state-of-the-art accuracy with a substantial speed advantage over existing open-vocabulary segmentation models. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/EOVSAM.