# DeVOS: Flow-Guided Deformable Transformer for Video Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Video Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14503/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning to Estimate Hidden Motions with Global Motion Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02409/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05210/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Video Object Segmentation by Foreground-Background Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08333/) (2020)
- [Modular Interactive Video Object Segmentation: Interaction-to-Mask, Propagation and Difference-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07941/) (2021)
- [Kernelized Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08270/) (2020)
- [Video Object Segmentation with Adaptive Feature Bank and Uncertain-Region Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07958/) (2020)
- [Collaborative Video Object Segmentation by Multi-Scale Foreground-Background Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06349/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Memory Matching Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11404/) (2021)
- [Deep Equilibrium Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08442/) (2022)
- [Look Before You Match: Instance Understanding Matters in Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06826/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Learning Temporal 3D Semantic Scene Completion via Optical Flow Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14520/) (2025)
- [A Universal Railway Obstacle Detection System based on Semi-supervised Segmentation And Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18908/) (2024)
- [Robust Promptable Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12006/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent works on Video Object Segmentation achieved remarkable results by matching dense semantic and instance-level features between the current and previous frames for long-time propagation. Nevertheless, global feature matching ignores scene motion context, failing to satisfy temporal consistency. Even though some methods introduce local matching branch to achieve smooth propagation, they fail to model complex appearance changes due to the constraints of the local window. In this paper, we present DeVOS (Deformable VOS), an architecture for Video Object Segmentation that combines memory-based matching with motion-guided propagation resulting in stable long-term modeling and strong temporal consistency. For short-term local propagation, we propose a novel attention mechanism ADVA (Adaptive Deformable Video Attention), allowing the adaption of similarity search region to query-specific semantic features, which ensures robust tracking of complex shape and scale changes. DeVOS employs an optical flow to obtain scene motion features which are further injected to deformable attention as strong priors to learnable offsets. Our method achieves top-rank performance on DAVIS 2017 val and test-dev (88.1%, 83.0%), YouTube-VOS 2019 val (86.6%) while featuring consistent run-time speed and stable memory consumption