English

InstructSAM: Segment Any Instance with Any Instructions

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-26 v1

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce InstructSAM, a unified and streamlined framework designed for multi-instance segmentation under arbitrary instructions. We formulates instruction-driven instance segmentation as a set-structured query prediction problem and propose an explicit reasoning-to-instance query interface that elegantly bridges a vision-language model (VLM) and SAM3. Specifically, a bank of learnable instance queries is injected into the VLM and contextualized with instruction and visual information, enabling each query to serve as an instance-aware slot. A hybrid-attention mechanism further promotes interaction among these queries, visual tokens, and instruction tokens, improving instance enumeration and reducing duplicate predictions. The resulting LLM-conditioned queries are projected into SAM3's detector query space to drive accurate multi-instance segmentation in a single forward pass. This design equips SAM3 with high-level instruction understanding, compositional reasoning, and instance-level set prediction without modifying its core architecture. To support training and evaluation, we further construct Inst2Seg, a high-quality and large-scale instruction-based instance segmentation dataset and benchmark that couples free-form instructions with instance-level masks. Extensive experiments show that only 2B-scale InstructSAM achieves strong results across complex instruction-driven and phrase-level referring segmentation benchmarks, outperforming prior end-to-end methods and SAM3's agentic pipeline while enabling efficient single-pass multi-instance prediction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26102,
  title  = {InstructSAM: Segment Any Instance with Any Instructions},
  author = {Yuqian Yuan and Wentong Li and Zhaocheng Li and Yutong Lin and Juncheng Li and Siliang Tang and Jun Xiao and Yueting Zhuang and Wenqiao Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26102},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 8 figures