# MobileVOS: Real-Time Video Object Segmentation Contrastive Learning meets Knowledge Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 64 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Born Again Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04770/) (2018)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [YouTube-VOS: A Large-Scale Video Object Segmentation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03327/) (2018)
- [Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09044/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [One-Shot Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05198/) (2016)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05210/) (2021)
- [FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09513/) (2019)
- [Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13256/) (2020)
- [Learning Video Object Segmentation from Static Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02646/) (2016)
- [Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation by Motion Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07658/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Video Object Segmentation by Foreground-Background Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08333/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Distillation Meets Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07114/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01153/) (2021)
- [Modular Interactive Video Object Segmentation: Interaction-to-Mask, Propagation and Difference-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07941/) (2021)
- [Video Object Segmentation with Episodic Graph Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07020/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [VkD: Improving Knowledge Distillation using Orthogonal Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06213/) (2024)
- [DaCapo: Accelerating Continuous Learning in Autonomous Systems for Video Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14353/) (2024)
- [CKD: Contrastive Knowledge Distillation from A Sample-wise Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14109/) (2024)
- [LiVOS: Light Video Object Segmentation with Gated Linear Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02818/) (2024)
- [Efficient Video Object Segmentation via Modulated Cross-Attention Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17937/) (2024)
- [DiDA: Video Object Segmentation with Distillation Learning of Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13937/) (2024)
- [InfoSAM: Fine-Tuning the Segment Anything Model from An Information-Theoretic Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21920/) (2025)
- [TrickVOS: A Bag of Tricks for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15377/) (2023)
- [Learning to Project for Cross-Task Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14494/) (2024)
- [Dynamic in Static: Hybrid Visual Correspondence for Self-Supervised Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13505/) (2024)
- [ActivityCLIP: Enhancing Group Activity Recognition by Mining Complementary Information from Text to Supplement Image Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19820/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Efficiency Optimization Techniques for DNN-based Video Analytics: Process Systems, Algorithms, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15628/) (2025)
- [PPMStereo: Pick-and-Play Memory Construction for Consistent Dynamic Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20178/) (2025)
- [MobileSAM2: Lightweight Segment Anything for Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12297/) (2026)
- [SWT: Self-Supervised Video Object Segmentation via Sliding, Wavelet and Transportation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31725/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised video object segmentation on resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones. We formulate this problem as a distillation task, whereby we demonstrate that small space-time-memory networks with finite memory can achieve competitive results with state of the art, but at a fraction of the computational cost (32 milliseconds per frame on a Samsung Galaxy S22). Specifically, we provide a theoretically grounded framework that unifies knowledge distillation with supervised contrastive representation learning. These models are able to jointly benefit from both pixel-wise contrastive learning and distillation from a pre-trained teacher. We validate this loss by achieving competitive J&F to state of the art on both the standard DAVIS and YouTube benchmarks, despite running up to 5x faster, and with 32x fewer parameters.