# GFR-SAM: Training-Free Referring Camouflaged Object Segmentation via Cross-Image Prompting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11732 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11732/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (2021)
- [Matcher: Segment Anything with One Shot Using All-Purpose Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13310/) (2023)
- [T-Rex2: Towards Generic Object Detection via Text-Visual Prompt Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14610/) (2024)
- [VRP-SAM: SAM with Visual Reference Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17726/) (2024)
- [Towards Training-free Open-world Segmentation via Image Prompt Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10912/) (2023)
- [Referring Camouflaged Object Detection With Multi-Context Overlapped Windows Cross-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13249/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Referring Camouflaged Object Detection (Ref-COD) requires segmenting hidden targets guided by reference cues. While supervised methods are annotation-heavy and training-free approaches via sparse point-prompting are sensitive to localization errors, we propose GFR-SAM, a robust three-stage training-free framework. GFR-SAM shifts the paradigm from fragile point-matching to a "Generate-Filter-Refine" pipeline. First, we introduce In-Context Exemplar-guided Segmentation, empowering SAM3 with cross-image inference to generate candidate masks via holistic visual exemplars, bypassing its native intra-image constraints. Second, a Region-Global Contrastive Filtering module ranks candidates through DINOv3-based prototypical alignment, effectively suppressing background distractors. Finally, a Geometric-Semantic Refinement module synergizes bounding box and text prompts to recover fine-grained boundaries and enhance instance recall. Evaluated on the R2C7K benchmark, GFR-SAM outperforms existing training-free methods by 8.7% in weighted F-measure (Fβw) and competes with supervised state-of-the-art counterparts. Ultimately, this work underscores the potential of unlocking SAM3's latent capability for cross-image In-Context prompting, establishing a robust, training-free paradigm that effectively bridges the gap between general-purpose foundation models and specialized, label-intensive perception tasks without the need for task-specific fine-tuning.