mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

X-SAM: From Segment Anything to Any Segmentation

arXiv 2508.04655 ↗First posted 6 Aug 2025cs.CV cs.AIcited by 30

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Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in broad knowledge representation, yet they are inherently deficient in pixel-level perceptual understanding. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a significant advancement in visual-prompt-driven image segmentation, it exhibits notable limitations in multi-mask prediction and category-specific segmentation tasks, and it cannot integrate all segmentation tasks within a unified model architecture. To address these limitations, we present X-SAM, a streamlined Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) framework that extends the segmentation paradigm from textitsegment anything to textitany segmentation. Specifically, we introduce a novel unified framework that enables more advanced pixel-level perceptual comprehension for MLLMs. Furthermore, we propose a new segmentation task, termed Visual GrounDed (VGD) segmentation, which segments all instance objects with interactive visual prompts and empowers MLLMs with visual grounded, pixel-wise interpretative capabilities. To enable effective training on diverse data sources, we present a unified training strategy that supports co-training across multiple datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that X-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of image segmentation benchmarks, highlighting its efficiency for multimodal, pixel-level visual understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/wanghao9610/X-SAM.

Key facts. Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 60 of its 77 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2025.

Builds on

60 of 77 references.

References · 60

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  3. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
  4. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
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38 more
  1. 2021Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentationcited by 2,351
  2. 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?cited by 2,141
  3. 2015Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attentioncited by 1,423
  4. 2023Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projectioncited by 1,402
  5. 2019LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentationcited by 1,217
  6. 2025SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Featurescited by 1,188
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  12. 2022Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIPcited by 565
  13. 2023Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularitycited by 509
  14. 2019Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentationcited by 481
  15. 2024VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Modelscited by 455
  16. 2023Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learnerscited by 446
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  18. 2020MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformerscited by 355
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 7; 2026: 23.

30 papers.

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  1. 2026Image Generators are Generalist Vision Learnerscited by 43
  2. 2025FG-CLIP 2: A Bilingual Fine-grained Vision-Language Alignment Modelcited by 13
  3. 2026SAMTok: Representing Any Mask with Two Wordscited by 11
  4. 2025SegEarth-R2: Towards Comprehensive Language-guided Segmentation for Remote Sensing Imagescited by 10
  5. 2025Citrus-V: Advancing Medical Foundation Models with Unified Medical Image Grounding for Clinical Reasoningcited by 8
  6. 2026Vision as Unified Multimodal Generationcited by 7
  7. 2025RSAgent: Learning to Reason and Act for Text-Guided Segmentation via Multi-Turn Tool Invocationscited by 6
  8. 2026LMMs Meet Object-Centric Vision: Understanding, Segmentation, Editing and Generationcited by 6
  9. 2026InstructSAM: Segment Any Instance with Any Instructionscited by 6
  10. 2025Evolving, Not Training: Zero-Shot Reasoning Segmentation via Evolutionary Promptingcited by 4
  11. 2026SegCompass: Exploring Interpretable Alignment with Sparse Autoencoders for Enhanced Reasoning Segmentationcited by 4
  12. 2025DSBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating External and In-Cabin Riskscited by 3
18 more
  1. 2026Enabling Training-Free Text-Based Remote Sensing Segmentationcited by 2
  2. 2026Rethinking MLLM Itself as a Segmenter with a Single Segmentation Tokencited by 2
  3. 2026See What I Mean: Aligning Vision and Language Representations for Video Fine-grained Object Understandingcited by 2
  4. 2026SetCon: Towards Open-Ended Referring Segmentation via Set-Level Concept Predictioncited by 2
  5. 2026PixelEyes: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Pinpoint Visual Evidence Seekingcited by 2
  6. 2025Reasoning-Driven Amodal Completion: Collaborative Agents and Perceptual Evaluationcited by 1
  7. 2026Tarot-SAM3: Training-free SAM3 for Any Referring Expression Segmentationcited by 1
  8. 2026EgoFun3D: Modeling Interactive Objects from Egocentric Videos using Function Templatescited by 1
  9. 2026X2SAM: Any Segmentation in Images and Videoscited by 1
  10. 2026Vision Harnessing Agent for Open Ad-hoc Segmentationcited by 1
  11. 2026B-GRTO: Bootstrapped Group Relative Tool Optimization for Referring Segmentationcited by 1
  12. 2026Mixture-of-Thought-Tokens: Unifying Perception and Reasoning for Free-form Multimodal Groundingcited by 1
  13. 2026MotionBits: Video Segmentation through Motion-Level Analysis of Rigid Bodiescited by 0
  14. 2026UniEvo-RS: Omni-Prompt Unified Remote Sensing Segmentation with Representative Exemplar-Driven Prototype Evolutioncited by 0
  15. 2026GeoRefer-Bench: A Benchmark from Referring Pixels to Verifiable Geospatial Reasoningcited by 0
  16. 2026Universal Cross-Prompt Adversarial Attacks on Promptable Concept Segmentationcited by 0
  17. 2026EviRover: Reinforcing Agentic Perception Beyond a Glancecited by 0
  18. 2026CoEvolve: Construct-to-Edit Visual Grounding with Bidirectional State Refinementcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Vision and Language Reference Prompt into SAM for Few-shot Segmentation
  2. 2025Segmentation as A Plug-and-Play Capability for Frozen Multimodal LLMs
  3. 2026Segmentation before Answering: Pixel Grounding for MLLM Visual Reasoning
  4. 2024InstructSeg: Unifying Instructed Visual Segmentation with Multi-modal Large Language Models
  5. 2024Composition Vision-Language Understanding via Segment and Depth Anything Model
  6. 2025The SAM2-to-SAM3 Gap in the Segment Anything Model Family: Why Prompt-Based Expertise Fails in Concept-Driven Image Segmentation
  7. 2025OpenWorldSAM: Extending SAM2 for Universal Image Segmentation with Language Prompts
  8. 2026SAM Meets VLM: Parameter-Decoupled Full-Parameter Training for Unified Medical Reasoning and Segmentation