# RMem: Restricted Memory Banks Improve Video Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08476 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08476/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09513/) (2019)
- [Streaming Long Video Understanding with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16009/) (2024)
- [Decoupling Features in Hierarchical Propagation for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09782/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Video Object Segmentation by Foreground-Background Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08333/) (2020)
- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Online Adaptation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09364/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Efficient Video Object Segmentation via Network Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01218/) (2018)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19236/) (2025)
- [SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16268/) (2024)
- [Surgical SAM 2: Real-time Segment Anything in Surgical Video by Efficient Frame Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07931/) (2024)
- [Advancing Complex Video Object Segmentation via Progressive Concept Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15852/) (2025)
- [MemFusionMap: Working Memory Fusion for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18737/) (2024)
- [Streaming Drag-Oriented Interactive Video Manipulation: Drag Anything, Anytime!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03550/) (2025)
- [One Token per Highly Selective Frame: Towards Extreme Compression for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14149/) (2026)
- [3AM: 3egment Anything with Geometric Consistency in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08831/) (2026)
- [Segment Anything for Video: A Comprehensive Review of Video Object Segmentation and Tracking from Past to Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22792/) (2025)
- [Distractor-Aware Memory-Based Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13864/) (2025)
- [Efficient-SAM2: Accelerating SAM2 with Object-Aware Visual Encoding and Memory Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08224/) (2026)
- [CMSA-Net: Causal Multi-scale Aggregation with Adaptive Multi-source Reference for Video Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22821/) (2026)
- [Fine-grained spatial-temporal perception for gas leak segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00295/) (2025)
- [Robust Ego-Exo Correspondence with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11417/) (2025)
- [Few-Shot Video Object Segmentation in X-Ray Angiography Using Local Matching and Spatio-Temporal Consistency Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00988/) (2026)
- [Live Interactive Training for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26929/) (2026)
- [SENTRY: SAM2-Enhanced Neighbor-Aware and Temporally Reasoned Memory for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24449/) (2026)
- [JVLGS: Joint Vision-Language Gas Leak Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19485/) (2025)
- [PPMStereo: Pick-and-Play Memory Construction for Consistent Dynamic Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20178/) (2025)
- [Tracking spatial temporal details in ultrasound long video via wavelet analysis and memory bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15066/) (2025)
- [SAM3Dual: A 3rd Place Solution to the MOSEv2 Track, 8th LSVOS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22193/) (2026)
- [TEDi: Temporal Memory-Enhanced and Denoising Transformer for Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16797/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With recent video object segmentation (VOS) benchmarks evolving to challenging scenarios, we revisit a simple but overlooked strategy: restricting the size of memory banks. This diverges from the prevalent practice of expanding memory banks to accommodate extensive historical information. Our specially designed "memory deciphering" study offers a pivotal insight underpinning such a strategy: expanding memory banks, while seemingly beneficial, actually increases the difficulty for VOS modules to decode relevant features due to the confusion from redundant information. By restricting memory banks to a limited number of essential frames, we achieve a notable improvement in VOS accuracy. This process balances the importance and freshness of frames to maintain an informative memory bank within a bounded capacity. Additionally, restricted memory banks reduce the training-inference discrepancy in memory lengths compared with continuous expansion. This fosters new opportunities in temporal reasoning and enables us to introduce the previously overlooked "temporal positional embedding." Finally, our insights are embodied in "RMem" ("R" for restricted), a simple yet effective VOS modification that excels at challenging VOS scenarios and establishes new state of the art for object state changes (on the VOST dataset) and long videos (on the Long Videos dataset). Our code and demo are available at https://restricted-memory.github.io/.