# Efficient Track Anything

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18933 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18933/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [MViTv2: Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01526/) (2021)
- [Nystr"omformer: A Nystr"om-Based Algorithm for Approximating Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03902/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00989/) (2023)
- [Fast Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12156/) (2023)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [Inpaint Anything: Segment Anything Meets Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06790/) (2023)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [FractalNet: Ultra-Deep Neural Networks without Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07648/) (2016)
- [Segment and Track Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06558/) (2023)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [VLA-Cache: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Manipulation via Adaptive Token Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02175/) (2025)
- [Omni-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Omnimodal Reasoning via Two-System Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20256/) (2025)
- [DynamicVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Dynamic Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22153/) (2026)
- [EfficientSAM3: Progressive Hierarchical Distillation for Video Concept Segmentation from SAM1, 2, and 3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15833/) (2025)
- [HyPSAM: Hybrid Prompt-driven Segment Anything Model for RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18738/) (2025)
- [Efficient-SAM2: Accelerating SAM2 with Object-Aware Visual Encoding and Memory Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08224/) (2026)
- [VCA: Vision-Click-Action Framework for Precise Manipulation of Segmented Objects in Target Ambiguous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23583/) (2026)
- [GRASPTrack: Geometry-Reasoned Association via Segmentation and Projection for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08117/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking EfficientTAM on FMO datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06536/) (2025)
- [SAM 2++: Tracking Anything at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18822/) (2025)
- [TinySAM 2: Extreme Memory Compression for Efficient Track Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18013/) (2026)
- [SENTRY: SAM2-Enhanced Neighbor-Aware and Temporally Reasoned Memory for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24449/) (2026)
- [SAM2Auto: Auto Annotation Using FLASH](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07850/) (2025)
- [Towards Better Ultrasound Video Segmentation Foundation Model: An Empirical study on SAM2 Finetuning from Data Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05731/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking SAM2-based Trackers on FMOX](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09633/) (2025)
- [A Multi-View Pipeline and Benchmark Dataset for 3D Hand Pose Estimation in Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15918/) (2026)
- [Robust Promptable Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12006/) (2026)
- [TextDS: Parameter-Efficient Representation Alignment for Scene Text Detection under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28077/) (2026)
- [Efficient Tracking and Understanding Object Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19743/) (2026)
- [Lean-SAM2: Target-Anchored Memory and Encoder Acceleration for SAM2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19811/) (2026)
- [StreamDAM: Presence-Aware Memory for Real-Time Streaming Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03912/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has emerged as a powerful tool for video object segmentation and tracking anything. Key components of SAM 2 that drive the impressive video object segmentation performance include a large multistage image encoder for frame feature extraction and a memory mechanism that stores memory contexts from past frames to help current frame segmentation. The high computation complexity of multistage image encoder and memory module has limited its applications in real-world tasks, e.g., video object segmentation on mobile devices. To address this limitation, we propose EfficientTAMs, lightweight track anything models that produce high-quality results with low latency and model size. Our idea is based on revisiting the plain, nonhierarchical Vision Transformer (ViT) as an image encoder for video object segmentation, and introducing an efficient memory module, which reduces the complexity for both frame feature extraction and memory computation for current frame segmentation. We take vanilla lightweight ViTs and efficient memory module to build EfficientTAMs, and train the models on SA-1B and SA-V datasets for video object segmentation and track anything tasks. We evaluate on multiple video segmentation benchmarks including semi-supervised VOS and promptable video segmentation, and find that our proposed EfficientTAM with vanilla ViT perform comparably to SAM 2 model (HieraB+SAM 2) with ~2x speedup on A100 and ~2.4x parameter reduction. On segment anything image tasks, our EfficientTAMs also perform favorably over original SAM with ~20x speedup on A100 and ~20x parameter reduction. On mobile devices such as iPhone 15 Pro Max, our EfficientTAMs can run at ~10 FPS for performing video object segmentation with reasonable quality, highlighting the capability of small models for on-device video object segmentation applications.