InstructSAM: Segment Any Instance with Any Instructions
Not on the map. Why?
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
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
- 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
- 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
- 2020End-to-End Object Detection with Transformerscited by 7,384
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
- 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,784
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2021Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentationcited by 2,338
- 2021Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Videocited by 1,530
- 2015Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptionscited by 897
- 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 835
37 more
- 2018Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Datasetcited by 789
- 2023LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Modelcited by 770
- 2023GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Modelcited by 447
- 2023Segment Anything in High Qualitycited by 373
- 2023Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applicationscited by 345
- 2023Fast Segment Anythingcited by 286
- 2023PixelLM: Pixel Reasoning with Large Multimodal Modelcited by 220
- 2024TokenPacker: Efficient Visual Projector for Multimodal LLMcited by 170
- 2023Osprey: Pixel Understanding with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 158
- 2025Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with MLLM for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videoscited by 154
- 2023GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 153
- 2023Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Surveycited by 124
- 2024VISA: Reasoning Video Object Segmentation via Large Language Modelscited by 123
- 2025HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptationcited by 112
- 2025HD-EPIC: A Highly-Detailed Egocentric Video Datasetcited by 101
- 2024PSALM: Pixelwise SegmentAtion with Large Multi-Modal Modelcited by 100
- 2024One Token to Seg Them All: Language Instructed Reasoning Segmentation in Videoscited by 99
- 2024VideoRefer Suite: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Object Understanding with Video LLMcited by 71
- 2024EVF-SAM: Early Vision-Language Fusion for Text-Prompted Segment Anything Modelcited by 63
- 2023VL-Grasp: a 6-Dof Interactive Grasp Policy for Language-Oriented Objects in Cluttered Indoor Scenescited by 40
- 2023GREC: Generalized Referring Expression Comprehensioncited by 39
- 2024InstructSeg: Unifying Instructed Visual Segmentation with Multi-modal Large Language Modelscited by 31
- 2025X-SAM: From Segment Anything to Any Segmentationcited by 30
- 2025PixelRefer: A Unified Framework for Spatio-Temporal Object Referring with Arbitrary Granularitycited by 21
- 2025EOC-Bench: Can MLLMs Identify, Recall, and Forecast Objects in an Egocentric World?cited by 20
- 2024HyperLLaVA: Dynamic Visual and Language Expert Tuning for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 19
- 2025RynnEC: Bringing MLLMs into Embodied Worldcited by 11
- 2025GroundingSuite: Measuring Complex Multi-Granular Pixel Groundingcited by 10
- 2025SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructionscited by 9
- 2026OmniCT: Towards a Unified Slice-Volume LVLM for Comprehensive CT Analysiscited by 9
- 2026Unified Personalized Understanding, Generating and Editingcited by 8
- 2026AgentVLN: Towards Agentic Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 8
- 2026MAU-GPT: Enhancing Multi-type Industrial Anomaly Understanding via Anomaly-aware and Generalist Experts Adaptationcited by 6
- 2026LMMs Meet Object-Centric Vision: Understanding, Segmentation, Editing and Generationcited by 6
- 2025HeartcareGPT: A Unified Multimodal ECG Suite for Dual Signal-Image Modeling and Understandingcited by 3
- 2026IAD-Unify: Task-Specific Interfaces for Industrial Anomaly Understanding, Segmentation, and Generationcited by 2
- 2026CrossView Suite: Harnessing Cross-view Spatial Intelligence of MLLMs with Dataset, Model and Benchmarkcited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026Trajectory-Relative Hindsight Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
- 2026Holtercare-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Term Dynamic ECG Analysiscited by 0
- 2026PANORAMA: Panoptic Grounded Captioning via Mask Proposal Selectioncited by 0
- 2026S4VY: Segment Anything in Feed-Forward 4D Visual Geometrycited by 0
- 2026Beyond the Remembered World: Predictive 4D Belief for Persistent Navigation in Evolving Worldscited by 0
- 2026RoboAware: Learning to Coordinate Embodied Skills from Counterfactual Outcomescited by 0
- 2026RoboAware: Learning to Coordinate Embodied Skills from Counterfactual Outcomes8 Oct 2026
- 2026Beyond the Remembered World: Predictive 4D Belief for Persistent Navigation in Evolving Worlds30 Sep 2026
- 2026S4VY: Segment Anything in Feed-Forward 4D Visual Geometry29 Sep 2026
- 2026PANORAMA: Panoptic Grounded Captioning via Mask Proposal Selection16 Sep 2026
- 2026Holtercare-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Term Dynamic ECG Analysis19 Aug 2026
- 2026Trajectory-Relative Hindsight Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning7 Aug 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025InstructPart: Task-Oriented Part Segmentation with Instruction Reasoning
- 2024INST-IT: Boosting Instance Understanding via Explicit Visual Prompt Instruction Tuning
- 2025EVTP-IVS: Effective Visual Token Pruning For Unifying Instruction Visual Segmentation In Multi-Modal Large Language Models
- 2026CoT-Seg: Rethinking Segmentation with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Self-Correction
- 2025NOVO: Bridging LLaVA and SAM with Visual-only Prompts for Reasoning Segmentation
- 2026Instruction Distillation: Text Instructions as Visual Examples
- 2024CoReS: Orchestrating the Dance of Reasoning and Segmentation
- 2025CYCLE-INSTRUCT: Fully Seed-Free Instruction Tuning via Dual Self-Training and Cycle Consistency