Referring Video Object Segmentation

Overview

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) studies how to turn a text, speech, or other prompt into pixel-level masks for the intended object across video frames. Common approaches combine vision-language models or multimodal large language models for query understanding with segmentation and tracking systems such as SAM, using object memories, key frames, motion cues, and mask propagation to maintain identity over time. Systems are trained on datasets such as Ref-YouTube-VOS, MeViS, DAVIS, and ReVOS, while training-free pipelines increasingly use object tracks and iterative reasoning; newer evaluations also test audio queries, absent targets, long untrimmed videos, and causal online settings. A central challenge is balancing accurate language grounding and stable masks under motion, occlusion, ambiguity, and target reappearance against the extra computation required for repeated reasoning or refinement.

Latest papers

CardsList

42 papers2 papers in the last four weeks, down 50% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. ATLAS: Learning to Adapt LVLM Attention for Reasoning Video Segmentation

    Oct 17, 2026Hamidreza Dastmalchi, Ali Cheraghian, Aijun An +2Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  2. Event-Driven Refresh and Recurrence Memory to Reduce Stale Grounding in Referring Video Object Segmentation

    Sep 30, 2026Abu Hanif Muhammad Syarubany, Jaehyun Jang, Siwoo Lim +2Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  3. OPERA: A Unified Omnimodal Progressive Spatio-Temporal Reasoning Agent for Referring Video Segmentation

    Sep 27, 2026Jingchen Ni, Yuji Wang, Shannan Yan +3Unified Multimodal ModelsReferring Video Object Segmentation

  4. MoVISA: Multi-Token Reasoning for Video Object Segmentation

    Sep 24, 2026Ruining Zhao, Ho Kei Cheng, Alexander G SchwingVideo Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  5. Report of the 8th LSVOS Challenge: Complex and Multimodal Video Object Segmentation

    Sep 5, 2026Chang Liu, Henghui Ding, Lingyi Hong +36Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  6. PhysMLLMs: Spatial Priors for Unified Referring Segmentation and Grounded Reasoning of Images and Videos

    Aug 25, 2026Siyao Yan, Bo Han, Jisheng Dang +7Referring Video Object SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

  7. Motion-Aware Reasoning from Speech to Mask Tracks: Runner-up Solution for the MeViS-Audio Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge 2026

    Aug 23, 2026Jinxing Zhou, Suiyi Zhao, Yanghao Zhou +1Referring Video Object SegmentationVisual Object Tracking

  8. Key-Frame Reasoning with SAM3: Third Place Solution for the MeViS-Text Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge

    Aug 18, 2026Ce Bian, Xusheng He, Jinrong Zhang +3Referring Video Object SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

  9. Unlocking Motion in Expressions: Temporal Calibration for Referring Video Object Segmentation

    Aug 17, 2026Yiwen Jiang, Zhengtong Zhu, Ruixin Zhang +1Referring Video Object SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

  10. Multi-Agent Target-Existence Verification and Learned Mask Geometry Refinement: Winning Report of the MeViS-Text Track at the 8th LSVOS Challenge 2026

    Aug 11, 2026Jungyoon Lee, Gyuil Lim, Doeon Kim +1Image SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  11. Agreement-Based Audio-Visual Segmentation:Champion Report for the MeViS-Audio Track in the 8th LSVOS Challenge

    Aug 10, 2026Yiwen Ren, Jianing Liu, Yingxin Wang +4Audio-Visual UnderstandingReferring Video Object Segmentation

  12. ReflexTrack: A Feedback-Driven Agent for Training-Free Referring Video Object Segmentation

    Jul 27, 2026Yuanjia Li, Tianyang Xu, Tao Zhou +3Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  13. Memory-Augmented Multimodal Large Language Models for Small Object Understanding in Streaming Aerial Videos

    Jul 22, 2026Penglei Sun, Yehua Huang, Zhuoli Tao +8Memory-Augmented VLMsAerial Robotics

  14. SkyVLaM: Multimodal Large Language Model for UAV Video Understanding in Remote Sensing

    Jul 19, 2026Kaiwen Jing, Ruixu Jia, Bingyao Li +3Referring Video Object SegmentationMultimodal Large Language Models

  15. Understanding From Human Perspective: A Multi-agent System for Interactive Egocentric Medical Image Segmentation

    Jul 19, 2026Rongjun Ge, Dongyang Wang, Heng Zhu +3Interactive Medical Image SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  16. Event-Aware Instructed Assistant for Referring Video Segmentation

    Jun 25, 2026Jinyu Liu, Henghui Ding, Shuting He +1Referring Video Object SegmentationMultimodal Large Language Models

  17. FeVOS: Foresight Expression Video Object Segmentation

    Jun 24, 2026Kehan Lan, Kaining Ying, Henghui DingVideo Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  18. Boosting Text-Driven Video Segmentation via Geometry-Aware Distillation

    Jun 23, 2026Tianyu Zhu, Yingping Liang, Hesong Li +1Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  19. VideoSEG-O3: A Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning Framework for Reasoning Video Object Segmentation

    Jun 5, 2026Ming Dai, Sen Yang, Boqiang Duan +4Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  20. SetCon: Towards Open-Ended Referring Segmentation via Set-Level Concept Prediction

    May 19, 2026Zhixiong Zhang, Yizhuo Li, Shuangrui Ding +6Image SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  21. See What I Mean: Aligning Vision and Language Representations for Video Fine-grained Object Understanding

    May 18, 2026Boyuan Sun, Bowen Yin, Yuanming Li +2Cross-Modal LearningVideo Object Segmentation

  22. Don't Guess, Just Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Referring Segmentation via Multi-turn Clarification

    May 17, 2026Yuting Yang, Haichao Jiang, Tianming Liang +2Image SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

  23. SteerSeg: Attention Steering for Reasoning Video Segmentation

    May 14, 2026Ali Cheraghian, Hamidreza Dastmalchi, Abdelwahed Khamis +3Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  24. Robust Promptable Video Object Segmentation

    May 12, 2026Sohyun Lee, Yeho Gwon, Lukas Hoyer +3Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation

  25. APRVOS: 1st Place Winner of 5th PVUW MeViS-Audio Track

    Apr 20, 2026Deshui Miao, Yameng Gu, Chao Yang +3Audio-Visual UnderstandingVideo Object Segmentation

  26. AgentRVOS for MeViS-Text Track of 5th PVUW Challenge: 3rd Method

    Apr 20, 2026Deshui Miao, Chao Yang, Chao Tian +4Image SegmentationVideo Object Segmentation

  27. Weakly-Supervised Referring Video Object Segmentation through Text Supervision

    Apr 20, 2026Miaojing Shi, Jun Huang, Zijie Yue +1Video Object SegmentationReferring Video Object Segmentation