# Tarot-SAM3: Training-free SAM3 for Any Referring Expression Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07916/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [Cross-Modal Self-Attention Network for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04745/) (2019)
- [Segmentation from Natural Language Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06180/) (2016)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10103/) (2023)
- [Towards Learning a Generalist Model for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02010/) (2023)
- [Referring Image Segmentation via Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00514/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Multimodal Interaction for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07939/) (2017)
- [ReSTR: Convolution-free Referring Image Segmentation Using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16768/) (2022)
- [VLT: Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15871/) (2022)
- [Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07175/) (2021)
- [PSALM: Pixelwise SegmentAtion with Large Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14598/) (2024)
- [Locate then Segment: A Strong Pipeline for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16284/) (2021)
- [General Object Foundation Model for Images and Videos at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09158/) (2023)
- [CLIP as RNN: Segment Countless Visual Concepts without Training Endeavor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07661/) (2023)
- [SAM4MLLM: Enhance Multi-Modal Large Language Model for Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10542/) (2024)

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

- [ConceptSeg-R1: Segment Any Concept via Meta-Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20385/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) aims to segment image regions described by natural-language expressions, serving as a bridge between vision and language understanding. Existing RES methods, however, rely heavily on large annotated datasets and are limited to either explicit or implicit expressions, hindering their ability to generalize to any referring expression. Recently, the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) has shown impressive robustness in Promptable Concept Segmentation. Nonetheless, applying it to RES remains challenging: (1) SAM3 struggles with longer or implicit expressions; (2) naive coupling of SAM3 with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) makes the final results overly dependent on the MLLM's reasoning capability, without enabling refinement of SAM3's segmentation outputs. To this end, we present Tarot-SAM3, a novel training-free framework that can accurately segment from any referring expression. Specifically, Tarot-SAM3 consists of two key phases. First, the Expression Reasoning Interpreter (ERI) phase introduces reasoning-assisted prompt options to support structured expression parsing and evaluation-aware rephrasing. This transforms arbitrary queries into robust heterogeneous prompts for generating reliable masks with SAM3. Second, the Mask Self-Refining (MSR) phase selects the best mask across prompt types and performs self-refinement by leveraging rich feature relationships from DINOv3 to compare discriminative regions among ERI outputs. It then infers region affiliation to the target, thereby correcting over- and under-segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Tarot-SAM3 achieves strong performance on both explicit and implicit RES benchmarks, as well as open-world scenarios. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each phase.