# SAM2Auto: Auto Annotation Using FLASH

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07850/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 90 of its 112 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 90)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [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)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07736/) (2020)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00831/) (2016)
- [TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02702/) (2021)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [Tracking Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01177/) (2020)
- [Tracking without bells and whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05625/) (2019)
- [MOTR: End-to-End Multiple-Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03247/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lag behind Large Language Models due to the scarcity of annotated datasets, as creating paired visual-textual annotations is labor-intensive and expensive. To address this bottleneck, we introduce SAM2Auto, the first fully automated annotation pipeline for video datasets requiring no human intervention or dataset-specific training. Our approach consists of two key components: SMART-OD, a robust object detection system that combines automatic mask generation with open-world object detection capabilities, and FLASH (Frame-Level Annotation and Segmentation Handler), a multi-object real-time video instance segmentation (VIS) that maintains consistent object identification across video frames even with intermittent detection gaps. Unlike existing open-world detection methods that require frame-specific hyperparameter tuning and suffer from numerous false positives, our system employs statistical approaches to minimize detection errors while ensuring consistent object tracking throughout entire video sequences. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that SAM2Auto achieves comparable accuracy to manual annotation while dramatically reducing annotation time and eliminating labor costs. The system successfully handles diverse datasets without requiring retraining or extensive parameter adjustments, making it a practical solution for large-scale dataset creation. Our work establishes a new baseline for automated video annotation and provides a pathway for accelerating VLM development by addressing the fundamental dataset bottleneck that has constrained progress in vision-language understanding.