SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts
Abstract
We present Segment Anything Model (SAM) 3, a unified model that detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts, which we define as either short noun phrases (e.g., "yellow school bus"), image exemplars, or a combination of both. Promptable Concept Segmentation (PCS) takes such prompts and returns segmentation masks and unique identities for all matching object instances. To advance PCS, we build a scalable data engine that produces a high-quality dataset with 4M unique concept labels, including hard negatives, across images and videos. Our model consists of an image-level detector and a memory-based video tracker that share a single backbone. Recognition and localization are decoupled with a presence head, which boosts detection accuracy. SAM 3 doubles the accuracy of existing systems in both image and video PCS, and improves previous SAM capabilities on visual segmentation tasks. We open source SAM 3 along with our new Segment Anything with Concepts (SA-Co) benchmark for promptable concept segmentation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.16719,
title = {SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts},
author = {Nicolas Carion and Laura Gustafson and Yuan-Ting Hu and Shoubhik Debnath and Ronghang Hu and Didac Suris and Chaitanya Ryali and Kalyan Vasudev Alwala and Haitham Khedr and Andrew Huang and Jie Lei and Tengyu Ma and Baishan Guo and Arpit Kalla and Markus Marks and Joseph Greer and Meng Wang and Peize Sun and Roman Rädle and Triantafyllos Afouras and Effrosyni Mavroudi and Katherine Xu and Tsung-Han Wu and Yu Zhou and Liliane Momeni and Rishi Hazra and Shuangrui Ding and Sagar Vaze and Francois Porcher and Feng Li and Siyuan Li and Aishwarya Kamath and Ho Kei Cheng and Piotr Dollár and Nikhila Ravi and Kate Saenko and Pengchuan Zhang and Christoph Feichtenhofer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.16719},
year = {2026}
}