# Unified Mask Embedding and Correspondence Learning for Self-Supervised Video Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10100 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10100/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [Learning Correspondence from the Cycle-Consistency of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07593/) (2019)
- [Space-Time Correspondence as a Contrastive Random Walk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14613/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05198/) (2016)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Tracking Emerges by Colorizing Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09594/) (2018)
- [Learning Video Object Segmentation from Static Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02646/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Dense Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05499/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation by Motion Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07658/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01153/) (2021)
- [Video Object Segmentation with Episodic Graph Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07020/) (2020)
- [Computational Optimal Transport: Complexity by Accelerated Gradient Descent Is Better Than by Sinkhorn's Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04367/) (2018)
- [Kernelized Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08270/) (2020)
- [MAST: A Memory-Augmented Self-supervised Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07793/) (2020)
- [SSTVOS: Sparse Spatiotemporal Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08833/) (2021)
- [Video Object Segmentation with Adaptive Feature Bank and Uncertain-Region Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07958/) (2020)
- [Video Object Segmentation Without Temporal Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06031/) (2017)
- [VideoMatch: Matching based Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01123/) (2018)
- [Learning What to Learn for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11540/) (2020)
- [Efficient Regional Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12934/) (2021)

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

- [CATR: Combinatorial-Dependence Audio-Queried Transformer for Audio-Visual Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09709/) (2023)
- [VideoMAC: Video Masked Autoencoders Meet ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19082/) (2024)
- [LOGICSEG: Parsing Visual Semantics with Neural Logic Learning and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13556/) (2023)
- [Clustering Propagation for Universal Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16646/) (2024)
- [Neural Clustering based Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17409/) (2024)
- [Betrayed by Attention: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17893/) (2023)
- [O-MaMa: Learning Object Mask Matching between Egocentric and Exocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06026/) (2025)
- [General and Task-Oriented Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06540/) (2024)
- [Studying Image Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05468/) (2025)
- [DiDA: Video Object Segmentation with Distillation Learning of Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13937/) (2024)
- [ZJU ReLER Submission for EPIC-KITCHEN Challenge 2023: TREK-150 Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02508/) (2023)
- [ZJU ReLER Submission for EPIC-KITCHEN Challenge 2023: Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02010/) (2023)
- [Dynamic in Static: Hybrid Visual Correspondence for Self-Supervised Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13505/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Motion Information for Better Self-Supervised Video Correspondence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12026/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Self-Supervised Fine-Grained Video Object Tracking with Dynamic Memory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21692/) (2025)
- [Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering for Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22665/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The objective of this paper is self-supervised learning of video object segmentation. We develop a unified framework which simultaneously models cross-frame dense correspondence for locally discriminative feature learning and embeds object-level context for target-mask decoding. As a result, it is able to directly learn to perform mask-guided sequential segmentation from unlabeled videos, in contrast to previous efforts usually relying on an oblique solution - cheaply "copying" labels according to pixel-wise correlations. Concretely, our algorithm alternates between i) clustering video pixels for creating pseudo segmentation labels ex nihilo; and ii) utilizing the pseudo labels to learn mask encoding and decoding for VOS. Unsupervised correspondence learning is further incorporated into this self-taught, mask embedding scheme, so as to ensure the generic nature of the learnt representation and avoid cluster degeneracy. Our algorithm sets state-of-the-arts on two standard benchmarks (i.e., DAVIS17 and YouTube-VOS), narrowing the gap between self- and fully-supervised VOS, in terms of both performance and network architecture design.