MobileSAM2: Lightweight Segment Anything for Spatial Intelligence
On the map: Knowledge distillation → Detection and dense prediction distillation
Abstract (arXiv)
The recent large video foundation model, SAM2, enables segment anything in both images and videos, serving as a powerful base model for various applications. However, many of such use cases require to operate on resource-constrained devices like mobile phones and laptops. In this work, we aim to make SAM2 more mobile-friendly by distilling the heavyweight SAM2 into a lightweight model, facilitating segment anything in both images and videos on mobile devices. To this end, we propose Hypergraphical Knowledge Distill (HyperKD), which introduces the idea of hypergraph into knowledge distillation, aiming to effectively model and transfer SAM2's generalizable and comprehensive knowledge. HyperKD consists of Temporal HyperKD and Granularity HyperKD that construct hypergraphs to explicitly model and extract the generalizable temporal knowledge and the comprehensive multi-granularity knowledge from SAM2 respectively, which are then distilled into the lightweight student model by aligning it with the constructed hypergraphs. Besides, we present MobileSAM2, a new family of lightweight SAM2 that balances efficiency and effectiveness via searching the best model architectures with HyperKD during model size reduction. Extensive experiments validate MobileSAM2 across multiple benchmarks and show promising generalization performance on embodied AI tasks.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation. Builds on 60 of its 86 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2026.
Builds on
60 of 86 references.
Closest ancestors · 6
Same direction, newest first
- 2023TinySAM: Pushing the Envelope for Efficient Segment Anything Model21 Dec
- 2023MobileVOS: Real-Time Video Object Segmentation Contrastive Learning meets Knowledge Distillation14 Mar
- 2022FAKD: Feature Augmented Knowledge Distillation for Semantic Segmentation30 Aug
- 2022Cross-Image Relational Knowledge Distillation for Semantic Segmentation14 Apr
- 2021Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection via Rank Mimicking and Prediction-guided Feature Imitation9 Dec
- 2021Online Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Pose Estimation4 Aug
Other references · 54
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2015Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Networkcited by 10,324
- 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,234
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,887
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
- 2014FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Netscited by 1,653
- 2020Knowledge Distillation: A Surveycited by 1,603
- 2019Contrastive Multiview Codingcited by 1,301
- 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
- 2019Relational Knowledge Distillationcited by 889
38 more
- 2020X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognitioncited by 637
- 2017Deep Mutual Learningcited by 628
- 2019Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistantcited by 573
- 2023Segment Everything Everywhere All at Oncecited by 548
- 2019Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillationcited by 516
- 2018Hypergraph Neural Networkscited by 488
- 2018YouTube-VOS: A Large-Scale Video Object Segmentation Benchmarkcited by 383
- 2023Segment Anything in High Qualitycited by 376
- 2023Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applicationscited by 352
- 2019A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillationcited by 348
- 2023Pix2Video: Video Editing using Image Diffusioncited by 320
- 2023Video-P2P: Video Editing with Cross-attention Controlcited by 314
- 2025R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 301
- 2023Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistlescited by 290
- 2023Fast Segment Anythingcited by 290
- 2021Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Reviewcited by 288
- 2019Correlation Congruence for Knowledge Distillationcited by 285
- 2019Structured Knowledge Distillation for Dense Predictioncited by 279
- 2022TinyViT: Fast Pretraining Distillation for Small Vision Transformerscited by 234
- 2023MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenescited by 234
- 2023Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videoscited by 234
- 2019Hypergraph Convolution and Hypergraph Attentioncited by 228
- 2023Semantic-SAM: Segment and Recognize Anything at Any Granularitycited by 185
- 2025LIBERO-PRO: Towards Robust and Fair Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Models Beyond Memorizationcited by 179
- 2024Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Searchcited by 175
- 2019Siam R-CNN: Visual Tracking by Re-Detectioncited by 174
- 2022Knowledge Distillation with the Reused Teacher Classifiercited by 141
- 2019Online Knowledge Distillation with Diverse Peerscited by 128
- 2026CaP-X: A Framework for Benchmarking and Improving Coding Agents for Robot Manipulationcited by 88
- 2022LVOS: A Benchmark for Long-term Video Object Segmentationcited by 77
- 2022Knowledge Distillation via the Target-aware Transformercited by 70
- 2023Class Attention Transfer Based Knowledge Distillationcited by 61
- 2020Inter-Region Affinity Distillation for Road Marking Segmentationcited by 58
- 2024Hyper-YOLO: When Visual Object Detection Meets Hypergraph Computationcited by 29
- 2023Do Not Blindly Imitate the Teacher: Using Perturbed Loss for Knowledge Distillationcited by 25
- 2024A Survey on Hypergraph Neural Networks: An In-Depth and Step-By-Step Guidecited by 23
- 2020Hypergraph reconstruction from network datacited by 18
- 2024A Survey on Hypergraph Mining: Patterns, Tools, and Generatorscited by 14
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- 2023Towards Comparable Knowledge Distillation in Semantic Image Segmentation
- 2026HyperVis: Continuous Latent Visual Relational Graphs on the Lorentz Hyperboloid for Compositional Reasoning
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- 2024Relative Difficulty Distillation for Semantic Segmentation