# SyncVIS: Synchronized Video Instance Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00882 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00882/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02702/) (2021)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Video Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14503/) (2020)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04804/) (2019)
- [Tracking without bells and whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05625/) (2019)
- [MOTS: Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03604/) (2019)
- [Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06664/) (2020)
- [Mask2Former for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10764/) (2021)
- [Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01558/) (2021)
- [Classifying, Segmenting, and Tracking Object Instances in Video with Mask Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04573/) (2019)
- [STEm-Seg: Spatio-temporal Embeddings for Instance Segmentation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08429/) (2020)
- [Global Tracking Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13250/) (2022)
- [SipMask: Spatial Information Preservation for Fast Image and Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14772/) (2020)
- [Video Instance Segmentation using Inter-Frame Communication Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03299/) (2021)
- [SeqFormer: Sequential Transformer for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08275/) (2021)
- [In Defense of Online Models for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10661/) (2022)
- [VITA: Video Instance Segmentation via Object Token Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04403/) (2022)
- [MinVIS: A Minimal Video Instance Segmentation Framework without Video-based Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02245/) (2022)
- [SG-Net: Spatial Granularity Network for One-Stage Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10284/) (2021)
- [Crossover Learning for Fast Online Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05970/) (2021)
- [DVIS: Decoupled Video Instance Segmentation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03413/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Beyond Appearance: Geometric Cues for Robust Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05948/) (2025)
- [DisCo: Towards Distinct and Coherent Visual Encapsulation in Video MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10302/) (2025)
- [Local2Global query Alignment for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20120/) (2025)
- [SAM-Enhanced Segmentation on Road Datasets: Balancing Critical Classes in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28136/) (2026)
- [Learning to Reason with Persistent Object States for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35539/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent DETR-based methods have advanced the development of Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) through transformers' efficiency and capability in modeling spatial and temporal information. Despite harvesting remarkable progress, existing works follow asynchronous designs, which model video sequences via either video-level queries only or adopting query-sensitive cascade structures, resulting in difficulties when handling complex and challenging video scenarios. In this work, we analyze the cause of this phenomenon and the limitations of the current solutions, and propose to conduct synchronized modeling via a new framework named SyncVIS. Specifically, SyncVIS explicitly introduces video-level query embeddings and designs two key modules to synchronize video-level query with frame-level query embeddings: a synchronized video-frame modeling paradigm and a synchronized embedding optimization strategy. The former attempts to promote the mutual learning of frame- and video-level embeddings with each other and the latter divides large video sequences into small clips for easier optimization. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted on the challenging YouTube-VIS 2019 & 2021 & 2022, and OVIS benchmarks and SyncVIS achieves state-of-the-art results, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/rkzheng99/SyncVIS.