Lean-SAM2: Target-Anchored Memory and Encoder Acceleration for SAM2
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Abstract (arXiv)
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has advanced temporal promptable segmentation, yet its deployment remains hindered by heavy memory cross-attention overhead and redundant full-frame visual feature extraction. While recent methods explore efficiency via heuristic memory pruning and window-based sparse routing, they typically suffer from catastrophic performance degradation in complex segmentation scenarios replete with occlusions and distractors. To resolve these limitations, we propose Lean-SAM2, a holistic lightweight framework designed to address the above vulnerabilities while systematically eliminating computational redundancies. Specifically, Lean-SAM2 integrates three collaborative mechanisms: (1) Target-Anchored Memory Pruning (TAMP) safeguards target tokens against deceptive attention by modulating raw attention significance with semantic consistency against prompt-derived foreground anchors; (2) Temporal Condensation with Insurance Memory (TCIM) condenses historical context via a visibility-gated fusion while conditionally archiving high-confidence entries in a parallel insurance bank; and (3) Target-Anchored Risk-Aware Routing (TARR) selectively activates the heavy image encoder for target-related windows based on anchor similarity, utilizing a risk-aware fallback policy to trigger full-frame refreshes during volatile transitions. Extensive evaluations across multiple challenging benchmarks demonstrate that Lean-SAM2 establishes a superior balance between accuracy and efficiency. For example, on the LVOSv2 validation dataset, Lean-SAM2 achieves overall inference speedups of 1.412× and 1.417× on the SAM2.1-Large and SAM2.1-Base+, respectively, significantly outperforming Efficient-SAM2 while boosting the corresponding J&F scores by 5.0% and 3.6%. Code is available at https://github.com/DeawhaleQwQ/Lean-SAM2.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 47 of its 62 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2026.
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47 of 62 references.
References · 47
- 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,784
- 2022Token Merging: Your ViT But Fastercited by 995
- 2021DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsificationcited by 849
- 2022XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Modelcited by 436
- 2021AdaViT: Adaptive Tokens for Efficient Vision Transformercited by 360
- 2022Not All Patches are What You Need: Expediting Vision Transformers via Token Reorganizationscited by 359
- 2023Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applicationscited by 345
- 2023Fast Segment Anythingcited by 286
- 2023MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenescited by 232
- 2023Token Merging for Fast Stable Diffusioncited by 220
- 2021Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentationcited by 200
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- 2023EfficientSAM: Leveraged Masked Image Pretraining for Efficient Segment Anythingcited by 187
- 2023Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentationcited by 182
- 2024Medical SAM 2: Segment medical images as video via Segment Anything Model 2cited by 151
- 2021A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentationcited by 132
- 2023RepViT: Revisiting Mobile CNN From ViT Perspectivecited by 123
- 2024SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memorycited by 91
- 2025MedSAM2: Segment Anything in 3D Medical Images and Videoscited by 88
- 2024SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Treecited by 77
- 2024A Distractor-Aware Memory for Visual Object Tracking with SAM2cited by 63
- 2025MOSEv2: A More Challenging Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenescited by 59
- 2024Surgical SAM 2: Real-time Segment Anything in Surgical Video by Efficient Frame Pruningcited by 46
- 2024LVOS: A Benchmark for Large-scale Long-term Video Object Segmentationcited by 41
- 2023TinySAM: Pushing the Envelope for Efficient Segment Anything Modelcited by 33
- 2024PTQ4SAM: Post-Training Quantization for Segment Anythingcited by 32
- 2024ALGM: Adaptive Local-then-Global Token Merging for Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Plain Vision Transformerscited by 28
- 2025EdgeTAM: On-Device Track Anything Modelcited by 21
- 2023SlimSAM: 0.1% Data Makes Segment Anything Slimcited by 20
- 2024Efficient Track Anythingcited by 20
- 2022Region Aware Video Object Segmentation with Deep Motion Modelingcited by 18
- 2024On Efficient Variants of Segment Anything Model: A Surveycited by 16
- 2024Segformer++: Efficient Token-Merging Strategies for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentationcited by 9
- 2025UniUltra: Interactive Parameter-Efficient SAM2 for Universal Ultrasound Segmentationcited by 5
- 2025SuperSAM: Crafting a SAM Supernetwork via Structured Pruning and Unstructured Parameter Prioritizationcited by 3
- 2025AHCQ-SAM: Toward Accurate and Hardware-Compatible Post-Training Segment Anything Model Quantizationcited by 3
- 2025SAQ-SAM: Semantically-Aligned Quantization for Segment Anything Modelcited by 3
- 2025SAM2LoRA: Composite Loss-Guided, Parameter-Efficient Finetuning of SAM2 for Retinal Fundus Segmentationcited by 3
- 2025Fast SAM2 with Text-Driven Token Pruningcited by 3
- 2026Efficient-SAM2: Accelerating SAM2 with Object-Aware Visual Encoding and Memory Retrievalcited by 2
- 2025Q-SAM2: Accurate Quantization for Segment Anything Model 2cited by 1
- 2025TSMS-SAM2: Multi-scale Temporal Sampling Augmentation and Memory-Splitting Pruning for Promptable Video Object Segmentation and Tracking in Surgical Scenarioscited by 1
- 2026Prompt-Free and Efficient SAM2 Adaptation for Biomedical Semantic Segmentation via Dual Adapterscited by 1
- 2026CAR-SAM: Cross-Attention Reconstruction for Post-Training Quantization of the Segment Anything Modelcited by 1
- 2026SparseSAM: Structured Sparsification of Activations in Segment Anything Modelscited by 1
- 2026TinySAM 2: Extreme Memory Compression for Efficient Track Anything Modelcited by 1
- 2026SENTRY: SAM2-Enhanced Neighbor-Aware and Temporally Reasoned Memory for Visual Trackingcited by 1
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- 2025The SAM2-to-SAM3 Gap in the Segment Anything Model Family: Why Prompt-Based Expertise Fails in Concept-Driven Image Segmentation
- 2026CLIP-Guided SAM: Parameter-Efficient Semantic Conditioning for Promptable Segmentation
- 2025SAM-PTx: Text-Guided Fine-Tuning of SAM with Parameter-Efficient, Parallel-Text Adapters
- 2026StructSAM: Structure- and Spectrum-Preserving Token Merging for Segment Anything Models
- 2025Prompt Engineering in Segment Anything Model: Methodologies, Applications, and Emerging Challenges
- 2026Putting Registers to Work: Task Registers for Token Pruning in Vision Transformers
- 2026When Attention Collapses: Stage-Aware Visual Token Pruning from Structure to Semantics
- 2025X-SAM: From Segment Anything to Any Segmentation