# Robust Egocentric Referring Video Object Segmentation via Dual-Modal Causal Intervention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24323 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24323/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Convex optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01946/) (2021)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [Counterfactual VQA: A Cause-Effect Look at Language Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04315/) (2020)
- [GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00968/) (2023)
- [MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08544/) (2023)
- [Tracking Anything with Decoupled Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03903/) (2023)
- [Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13899/) (2023)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation with Language Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08006/) (2018)
- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Referring Video Object Segmentation with Multimodal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14821/) (2021)
- [Learning Semantic-Specific Graph Representation for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07325/) (2019)
- [PhraseCut: Language-based Image Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01187/) (2020)
- [Interventional Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13000/) (2020)

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

- [Understanding From Human Perspective: A Multi-agent System for Interactive Egocentric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17341/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Egocentric Referring Video Object Segmentation (Ego-RVOS) aims to segment the specific object actively involved in a human action, as described by a language query, within first-person videos. This task is critical for understanding egocentric human behavior. However, achieving such segmentation robustly is challenging due to ambiguities inherent in egocentric videos and biases present in training data. Consequently, existing methods often struggle, learning spurious correlations from skewed object-action pairings in datasets and fundamental visual confounding factors of the egocentric perspective, such as rapid motion and frequent occlusions. To address these limitations, we introduce Causal Ego-REferring Segmentation (CERES), a plug-in causal framework that adapts strong, pre-trained RVOS backbones to the egocentric domain. CERES implements dual-modal causal intervention: applying backdoor adjustment principles to counteract language representation biases learned from dataset statistics, and leveraging front-door adjustment concepts to address visual confounding by intelligently integrating semantic visual features with geometric depth information guided by causal principles, creating representations more robust to egocentric distortions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CERES achieves state-of-the-art performance on Ego-RVOS benchmarks, highlighting the potential of applying causal reasoning to build more reliable models for broader egocentric video understanding.