mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

InstructSAM: Segment Any Instance with Any Instructions

arXiv 2605.26102 ↗First posted 25 May 2026cs.CVcited by 6

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Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce InstructSAM, a unified and streamlined framework designed for multi-instance segmentation under arbitrary instructions. We formulates instruction-driven instance segmentation as a set-structured query prediction problem and propose an explicit reasoning-to-instance query interface that elegantly bridges a vision-language model (VLM) and SAM3. Specifically, a bank of learnable instance queries is injected into the VLM and contextualized with instruction and visual information, enabling each query to serve as an instance-aware slot. A hybrid-attention mechanism further promotes interaction among these queries, visual tokens, and instruction tokens, improving instance enumeration and reducing duplicate predictions. The resulting LLM-conditioned queries are projected into SAM3's detector query space to drive accurate multi-instance segmentation in a single forward pass. This design equips SAM3 with high-level instruction understanding, compositional reasoning, and instance-level set prediction without modifying its core architecture. To support training and evaluation, we further construct Inst2Seg, a high-quality and large-scale instruction-based instance segmentation dataset and benchmark that couples free-form instructions with instance-level masks. Extensive experiments show that only 2B-scale InstructSAM achieves strong results across complex instruction-driven and phrase-level referring segmentation benchmarks, outperforming prior end-to-end methods and SAM3's agentic pipeline while enabling efficient single-pass multi-instance prediction.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 49 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.

Builds on

49 of 51 references.

References · 49

  1. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
  2. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
  3. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
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  8. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  9. 2021Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentationcited by 2,338
  10. 2021Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Videocited by 1,530
  11. 2015Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptionscited by 897
  12. 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 835
37 more
  1. 2018Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Datasetcited by 789
  2. 2023LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Modelcited by 770
  3. 2023GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Modelcited by 447
  4. 2023Segment Anything in High Qualitycited by 373
  5. 2023Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applicationscited by 345
  6. 2023Fast Segment Anythingcited by 286
  7. 2023PixelLM: Pixel Reasoning with Large Multimodal Modelcited by 220
  8. 2024TokenPacker: Efficient Visual Projector for Multimodal LLMcited by 170
  9. 2023Osprey: Pixel Understanding with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 158
  10. 2025Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with MLLM for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videoscited by 154
  11. 2023GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 153
  12. 2023Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Surveycited by 124
  13. 2024VISA: Reasoning Video Object Segmentation via Large Language Modelscited by 123
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  15. 2025HD-EPIC: A Highly-Detailed Egocentric Video Datasetcited by 101
  16. 2024PSALM: Pixelwise SegmentAtion with Large Multi-Modal Modelcited by 100
  17. 2024One Token to Seg Them All: Language Instructed Reasoning Segmentation in Videoscited by 99
  18. 2024VideoRefer Suite: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Object Understanding with Video LLMcited by 71
  19. 2024EVF-SAM: Early Vision-Language Fusion for Text-Prompted Segment Anything Modelcited by 63
  20. 2023VL-Grasp: a 6-Dof Interactive Grasp Policy for Language-Oriented Objects in Cluttered Indoor Scenescited by 40
  21. 2023GREC: Generalized Referring Expression Comprehensioncited by 39
  22. 2024InstructSeg: Unifying Instructed Visual Segmentation with Multi-modal Large Language Modelscited by 31
  23. 2025X-SAM: From Segment Anything to Any Segmentationcited by 30
  24. 2025PixelRefer: A Unified Framework for Spatio-Temporal Object Referring with Arbitrary Granularitycited by 21
  25. 2025EOC-Bench: Can MLLMs Identify, Recall, and Forecast Objects in an Egocentric World?cited by 20
  26. 2024HyperLLaVA: Dynamic Visual and Language Expert Tuning for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 19
  27. 2025RynnEC: Bringing MLLMs into Embodied Worldcited by 11
  28. 2025GroundingSuite: Measuring Complex Multi-Granular Pixel Groundingcited by 10
  29. 2025SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructionscited by 9
  30. 2026OmniCT: Towards a Unified Slice-Volume LVLM for Comprehensive CT Analysiscited by 9
  31. 2026Unified Personalized Understanding, Generating and Editingcited by 8
  32. 2026AgentVLN: Towards Agentic Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 8
  33. 2026MAU-GPT: Enhancing Multi-type Industrial Anomaly Understanding via Anomaly-aware and Generalist Experts Adaptationcited by 6
  34. 2026LMMs Meet Object-Centric Vision: Understanding, Segmentation, Editing and Generationcited by 6
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  37. 2026CrossView Suite: Harnessing Cross-view Spatial Intelligence of MLLMs with Dataset, Model and Benchmarkcited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025InstructPart: Task-Oriented Part Segmentation with Instruction Reasoning
  2. 2024INST-IT: Boosting Instance Understanding via Explicit Visual Prompt Instruction Tuning
  3. 2025EVTP-IVS: Effective Visual Token Pruning For Unifying Instruction Visual Segmentation In Multi-Modal Large Language Models
  4. 2026CoT-Seg: Rethinking Segmentation with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Self-Correction
  5. 2025NOVO: Bridging LLaVA and SAM with Visual-only Prompts for Reasoning Segmentation
  6. 2026Instruction Distillation: Text Instructions as Visual Examples
  7. 2024CoReS: Orchestrating the Dance of Reasoning and Segmentation
  8. 2025CYCLE-INSTRUCT: Fully Seed-Free Instruction Tuning via Dual Self-Training and Cycle Consistency