Papers › EVF-SAM: Early Vision-Language Fusion for Text-Prompted Segment Anything Model
EVF-SAM: Early Vision-Language Fusion for Text-Prompted Segment Anything Model
Yuxuan Zhang, Tianheng Cheng, Rui Hu, Lei Liu, Heng Liu, Longjin Ran, Xiaoxin Chen, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has attracted widespread attention for its superior interactive segmentation capabilities with visual prompts while lacking further exploration of text prompts. In this paper, we empirically investigate what text prompt encoders (e.g., CLIP or LLM) are good for adapting SAM for referring expression segmentation and introduce the Early Vision-language Fusion-based SAM (EVF-SAM). EVF-SAM is a simple yet effective referring segmentation method which exploits multimodal prompts (i.e., image and text) and comprises a pre-trained vision-language model to generate referring prompts and a SAM model for segmentation. Surprisingly, we observe that: (1) multimodal prompts and (2) vision-language models with early fusion (e.g., BEIT-3) are beneficial for prompting SAM for accurate referring segmentation. Our experiments show that the proposed EVF-SAM based on BEIT-3 can obtain state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO/+/g for referring expression segmentation and demonstrate the superiority of prompting SAM with early vision-language fusion. In addition, the proposed EVF-SAM with 1.32B parameters achieves remarkably higher performance while reducing nearly 82% of parameters compared to previous SAM methods based on large multimodal models.
In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.
Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2406.20076")
Code
Syntology Ran 3 of 3 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 2 ran · fixture could not drive it.
By repository: official repository: 1 sample from 1 repository, 1 ran; 2 identical to code first harvested elsewhere. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
3 samples harvested; 3 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-25; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 2 of the 3 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Harvested from hustvl/evf-sam. Some samples are identical code Syntology first harvested from another repository; for those, this paper's copy is not located and its licence is not recorded. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.
Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.
736601618e338997 · report
a1c2083ec2eaeb22 · report
a9292f5d89194794 · report
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Referring Expression Segmentation | RefCOCO testA | EVF-SAM | Overall IoU | 84.2 | #4 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | RefCOCO testB | EVF-SAM | Overall IoU | 80.2 | #4 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | RefCOCO+ test B | EVF-SAM | Overall IoU | 71.9 | #3 of 30 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | RefCOCO+ testA | EVF-SAM | Overall IoU | 80 | #4 of 30 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | RefCOCO+ val | EVF-SAM | Overall IoU | 76.5 | #4 of 33 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | RefCOCOg-test | EVF-SAM | Overall IoU | 78.3 | #5 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | RefCOCOg-val | EVF-SAM | Overall IoU | 78.2 | #5 of 23 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | RefCoCo val | EVF-SAM | Overall IoU | 82.4 | #6 of 37 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections