Papers › OnlineRefer: A Simple Online Baseline for Referring Video Object Segmentation
OnlineRefer: A Simple Online Baseline for Referring Video Object Segmentation
Dongming Wu, Tiancai Wang, Yuang Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang, Jianbing Shen
Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims at segmenting an object in a video following human instruction. Current state-of-the-art methods fall into an offline pattern, in which each clip independently interacts with text embedding for cross-modal understanding. They usually present that the offline pattern is necessary for RVOS, yet model limited temporal association within each clip. In this work, we break up the previous offline belief and propose a simple yet effective online model using explicit query propagation, named OnlineRefer. Specifically, our approach leverages target cues that gather semantic information and position prior to improve the accuracy and ease of referring predictions for the current frame. Furthermore, we generalize our online model into a semi-online framework to be compatible with video-based backbones. To show the effectiveness of our method, we evaluate it on four benchmarks, \ie, Refer-Youtube-VOS, Refer-DAVIS17, A2D-Sentences, and JHMDB-Sentences. Without bells and whistles, our OnlineRefer with a Swin-L backbone achieves 63.5 J&F and 64.8 J&F on Refer-Youtube-VOS and Refer-DAVIS17, outperforming all other offline methods.
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="2307.09356")
Code
Syntology Ran 6 of 7 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 1 has no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 2 ran · our draft was wrong; 3 ran with no contract checked.
By repository: official repository: 7 samples from 1 repository, 6 ran. 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
7 samples harvested; 6 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 1 has 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: 0 of the 7 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 wudongming97/onlinerefer. “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.
29dbbaafa4be18e1 · report
ef1a3e10a9dbf4a9 · report
ed1a308adb65f645 · report
46f34dc9f9a94b67 · report
79016404390adaca · report
2626a807bce7587a · report
ccbe959ea69981ad · report
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Referring Expression Segmentation | Refer-YouTube-VOS (2021 public validation) | OnlineRefer (Swin-L, online) | F | 65.5 | #21 of 33 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | Refer-YouTube-VOS (2021 public validation) | OnlineRefer (Swin-L, online) | J | 61.6 | #21 of 33 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Referring Expression Segmentation | Refer-YouTube-VOS (2021 public validation) | OnlineRefer (Swin-L, online) | J&F | 63.5 | #21 of 33 | 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