# Long-RVOS: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Long-term Referring Video Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12702 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12702/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00265/) (2025)
- [Seg-ReSearch: Segmentation with Interleaved Reasoning and External Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04454/) (2026)
- [The 1st Winner for 5th PVUW MeViS-Text Challenge: Strong MLLMs Meet SAM3 for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00404/) (2026)
- [Don't Guess, Just Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Referring Segmentation via Multi-turn Clarification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17531/) (2026)
- [VideoSEG-O3: A Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning Framework for Reasoning Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06819/) (2026)
- [LD-RSVIS: A Large-Scale and Diverse Benchmark for Referring Surgical Video Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23067/) (2026)
- [When Predicting Nothing Beats SAM 3: Revisiting Evaluation in Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02946/) (2026)
- [RAIN: Robotic Task Generalization with Region-Aware Interaction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14039/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to identify, track and segment the objects in a video based on language descriptions, which has received great attention in recent years. However, existing datasets remain focus on short video clips within several seconds, with salient objects visible in most frames. To advance the task towards more practical scenarios, we introduce Long-RVOS, a large-scale benchmark for long-term referring video object segmentation. Long-RVOS contains 2,000+ videos of an average duration exceeding 60 seconds, covering a variety of objects that undergo occlusion, disappearance-reappearance and shot changing. The objects are manually annotated with three different types of descriptions to individually evaluate the understanding of static attributes, motion patterns and spatiotemporal relationships. Moreover, unlike previous benchmarks that rely solely on the per-frame spatial evaluation, we introduce two new metrics to assess the temporal and spatiotemporal consistency. We benchmark 6 state-of-the-art methods on Long-RVOS. The results show that current approaches struggle severely with the long-video challenges. To address this, we further propose ReferMo, a promising baseline method that integrates motion information to expand the temporal receptive field, and employs a local-to-global architecture to capture both short-term dynamics and long-term dependencies. Despite simplicity, ReferMo achieves significant improvements over current methods in long-term scenarios. We hope that Long-RVOS and our baseline can drive future RVOS research towards tackling more realistic and long-form videos.