# When Trackers Fail: VLM-Guided Verification and Recovery for Robust Video Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15929 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15929/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03465/) (2020)
- [VISA: Reasoning Video Object Segmentation via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11325/) (2024)
- [Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16746/) (2021)
- [One Token to Seg Them All: Language Instructed Reasoning Segmentation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19603/) (2024)
- [SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11922/) (2024)
- [SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16268/) (2024)
- [A Distractor-Aware Memory for Visual Object Tracking with SAM2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17576/) (2024)
- [LVOS: A Benchmark for Large-scale Long-term Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19326/) (2024)
- [SAMWISE: Infusing Wisdom in SAM2 for Text-Driven Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17646/) (2024)
- [Look Before You Match: Instance Understanding Matters in Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06826/) (2022)
- [TarViS: A Unified Approach for Target-based Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02657/) (2023)
- [Advancing Complex Video Object Segmentation via Progressive Concept Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15852/) (2025)
- [UniVS: Unified and Universal Video Segmentation with Prompts as Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18115/) (2024)
- [RefSAM: Efficiently Adapting Segmenting Anything Model for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00997/) (2023)
- [ViLLa: Video Reasoning Segmentation with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14500/) (2024)
- [Unleashing the Temporal-Spatial Reasoning Capacity of GPT for Training-Free Audio and Language Referenced Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15876/) (2024)
- [CoT-RVS: Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Segmentation for Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18561/) (2025)
- [Refer-Agent: A Collaborative Multi-Agent System with Reasoning and Reflection for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03595/) (2026)
- [VideoSeg-R1:Reasoning Video Object Segmentation via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16077/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent trackers built on foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) achieve strong performance by propagating object masks through memory. However, this strength is also a key source of failure: under occlusion, reappearance, or distractors, an incorrect prediction can enter the tracking loop and be propagated over time, resulting in persistent identity drift. Existing approaches seek to prevent such failures through improved memory and temporal modeling, but once a failure occurs, the tracker has no explicit mechanism to recognize or correct it. We address this gap with Dual-Agent, a failure-aware tracking framework that complements propagation with explicit verification and recovery. We address this gap with Dual-Agent, a failure-aware tracking framework that complements propagation with explicit verification and recovery. A vision-language verification agent first reasons over spatio-temporal context to determine whether the tracker is still following the target. When a failure is detected, a correction agent uses temporal context to recover the target before tracking continues. The correction agent is trained on real SAM3 failures, augmented with targeted identity-switch and distractor perturbations that expose it to challenging ambiguities during recovery. On LVOS-v2 and SecVOS, Dual-Agent improves SAM3 by 1.2 and 2.7 J&F, respectively. Importantly, the proposed framework transfers without retraining to SAM2.1, SeC, and Cutie, as well as to long-term video object tracking benchmarks including LaSOT-ext, TNL2K, and VOT-LT2022. Our results show that explicitly reasoning about when tracking fails and how to recover provides a complementary path to robust tracking beyond improving propagation alone. Project page: valaybundele.github.io/Dual-Agent.