# Towards Visual Query Segmentation in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08898 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08898/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04804/) (2019)
- [Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00989/) (2023)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01558/) (2021)
- [VISA: Reasoning Video Object Segmentation via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11325/) (2024)
- [V3Det: Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03752/) (2023)
- [SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16268/) (2024)
- [LVOS: A Benchmark for Long-term Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10181/) (2022)
- [A Distractor-Aware Memory for Visual Object Tracking with SAM2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17576/) (2024)
- [Scalable Video Object Segmentation with Simplified Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09903/) (2023)
- [Where is my Wallet? Modeling Object Proposal Sets for Egocentric Visual Query Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10528/) (2022)
- [Single-Stage Visual Query Localization in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09324/) (2023)
- [Online Episodic Memory Visual Query Localization with Egocentric Streaming Object Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16934/) (2024)
- [RELOCATE: A Simple Training-Free Baseline for Visual Query Localization Using Region-Based Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01826/) (2024)
- [PRVQL: Progressive Knowledge-guided Refinement for Robust Egocentric Visual Query Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07707/) (2025)
- [LiVOS: Light Video Object Segmentation with Gated Linear Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02818/) (2024)
- [OmniSTVG: Toward Spatio-Temporal Omni-Object Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10500/) (2025)
- [REN: Fast and Efficient Region Encodings from Patch-Based Image Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18153/) (2025)
- [Latest Object Memory Management for Temporally Consistent Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19754/) (2025)
- [Structure Matters: Revisiting Boundary Refinement in Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18944/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce visual query segmentation (VQS), a new paradigm of visual query localization (VQL) that aims to segment all pixel-level occurrences of an object of interest in an untrimmed video, given an external visual query. Compared to existing VQL locating only the last appearance of a target using bounding boxes, VQS enables more comprehensive (i.e., all object occurrences) and precise (i.e., pixel-level masks) localization, making it more practical for real-world scenarios. To foster research on this task, we present VQS-4K, a large-scale benchmark dedicated to VQS. Specifically, VQS-4K contains 4,111 videos with more than 1.3 million frames and covers a diverse set of 222 object categories. Each video is paired with a visual query defined by a frame outside the search video and its target mask, and annotated with spatial-temporal masklets corresponding to the queried target. To ensure high quality, all videos in VQS-4K are manually labeled with meticulous inspection and iterative refinement. To the best of our knowledge, VQS-4K is the first benchmark specifically designed for VQS. Furthermore, to stimulate future research, we present a simple yet effective method, named VQ-SAM, which extends SAM 2 by leveraging target-specific and background distractor cues from the video to progressively evolve the memory through a novel multi-stage framework with an adaptive memory generation (AMG) module for VQS, significantly improving the performance. In our extensive experiments on VQS-4K, VQ-SAM achieves promising results and surpasses all existing approaches, demonstrating its effectiveness. With the proposed VQS-4K and VQ-SAM, we expect to go beyond the current VQL paradigm and inspire more future research and practical applications on VQS. Our benchmark, code, and results will be made publicly available.