SAM3-LiteText: An Anatomical Study of the SAM3 Text Encoder for Efficient Vision-Language Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Zeng, Chengxi, Jiang, Yuxuan, Gao, Ge, Wang, Shuai, Danier, Duolikun, Zhu, Bin, Rudinac, Stevan, Bull, David, Zhang, Fan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866911443684687872
author Zeng, Chengxi
Jiang, Yuxuan
Gao, Ge
Wang, Shuai
Danier, Duolikun
Zhu, Bin
Rudinac, Stevan
Bull, David
Zhang, Fan
author_facet Zeng, Chengxi
Jiang, Yuxuan
Gao, Ge
Wang, Shuai
Danier, Duolikun
Zhu, Bin
Rudinac, Stevan
Bull, David
Zhang, Fan
contents Vision-language segmentation models such as SAM3 enable flexible, prompt-driven visual grounding, but inherit large, general-purpose text encoders originally designed for open-ended language understanding. In practice, segmentation prompts are short, structured, and semantically constrained, leading to substantial over-provisioning in text encoder capacity and persistent computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we perform a large-scale anatomical analysis of text prompting in vision-language segmentation, covering 404,796 real prompts across multiple benchmarks. Our analysis reveals severe redundancy: most context windows are underutilized, vocabulary usage is highly sparse, and text embeddings lie on low-dimensional manifold despite high-dimensional representations. Motivated by these findings, we propose SAM3-LiteText, a lightweight text encoding framework that replaces the original SAM3 text encoder with a compact MobileCLIP student that is optimized by knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on image and video segmentation benchmarks show that SAM3-LiteText reduces text encoder parameters by up to 88%, substantially reducing static memory footprint, while maintaining segmentation performance comparable to the original model. Code: https://github.com/SimonZeng7108/efficientsam3/tree/sam3_litetext.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_12173
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAM3-LiteText: An Anatomical Study of the SAM3 Text Encoder for Efficient Vision-Language Segmentation
Zeng, Chengxi
Jiang, Yuxuan
Gao, Ge
Wang, Shuai
Danier, Duolikun
Zhu, Bin
Rudinac, Stevan
Bull, David
Zhang, Fan
Artificial Intelligence
Vision-language segmentation models such as SAM3 enable flexible, prompt-driven visual grounding, but inherit large, general-purpose text encoders originally designed for open-ended language understanding. In practice, segmentation prompts are short, structured, and semantically constrained, leading to substantial over-provisioning in text encoder capacity and persistent computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we perform a large-scale anatomical analysis of text prompting in vision-language segmentation, covering 404,796 real prompts across multiple benchmarks. Our analysis reveals severe redundancy: most context windows are underutilized, vocabulary usage is highly sparse, and text embeddings lie on low-dimensional manifold despite high-dimensional representations. Motivated by these findings, we propose SAM3-LiteText, a lightweight text encoding framework that replaces the original SAM3 text encoder with a compact MobileCLIP student that is optimized by knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on image and video segmentation benchmarks show that SAM3-LiteText reduces text encoder parameters by up to 88%, substantially reducing static memory footprint, while maintaining segmentation performance comparable to the original model. Code: https://github.com/SimonZeng7108/efficientsam3/tree/sam3_litetext.
title SAM3-LiteText: An Anatomical Study of the SAM3 Text Encoder for Efficient Vision-Language Segmentation
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12173