# Rethinking Memory Design in SAM-Based Visual Object Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22624 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22624/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (2018)
- [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)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Benchmark for Large-scale Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07845/) (2018)
- [TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10794/) (2018)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03465/) (2020)
- [Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16746/) (2021)
- [SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11922/) (2024)
- [SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16268/) (2024)
- [A Distractor-Aware Memory for Visual Object Tracking with SAM2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17576/) (2024)
- [XMem++: Production-level Video Segmentation From Few Annotated Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15958/) (2023)
- [HiM2SAM: Enhancing SAM2 with Hierarchical Motion Estimation and Memory Optimization towards Long-term Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07603/) (2025)
- [SAMITE: Position Prompted SAM2 with Calibrated Memory for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21732/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [HyperDAM: Hyperspectral Distractor-Aware Memory with Amodal Expansion for SAM 3 Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34396/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

noindent Memory has become the central mechanism enabling robust visual object tracking in modern segmentation-based frameworks. Recent methods built upon Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) have demonstrated strong performance by refining how past observations are stored and reused. However, existing approaches address memory limitations in a method-specific manner, leaving the broader design principles of memory in SAM-based tracking poorly understood. Moreover, it remains unclear how these memory mechanisms transfer to stronger, next-generation foundation models such as Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3). In this work, we present a systematic memory-centric study of SAM-based visual object tracking. We first analyze representative SAM2-based trackers and show that most methods primarily differ in how short-term memory frames are selected, while sharing a common object-centric representation. Building on this insight, we faithfully reimplement these memory mechanisms within the SAM3 framework and conduct large-scale evaluations across ten diverse benchmarks, enabling a controlled analysis of memory design independent of backbone strength. Guided by our empirical findings, we propose a unified hybrid memory framework that explicitly decomposes memory into short-term appearance memory and long-term distractor-resolving memory. This decomposition enables the integration of existing memory policies in a modular and principled manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves robustness under long-term occlusion, complex motion, and distractor-heavy scenarios on both SAM2 and SAM3 backbones. Code is available at: https://github.com/HamadYA/SAM3TrackingZoo. This is a preprint. Some results are being finalized and may be updated in a future revision.