MarkMoHR/Awesome-Referring-Image-Segmentation

:books: A collection of papers about Referring Image Segmentation.

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updated Jan 28, 2026

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Awesome-Referring-Image-Segmentation

A collection of referring image segmentation papers and datasets.

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Outline

Awesome-Referring-Image-Segmentation

1. Datasets

Short name	Paper	Source	Code/Project Link
MeViS	MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressions	ICCV 2023	[dataset] [project]
gRefCOCO	GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation	CVPR 2023	[dataset] [project]
ClevrTex	ClevrTex: A Texture-Rich Benchmark for Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation	NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2021	[project]
ScanRefer	ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language	ECCV 2020	[project]
VGPhraseCut	PhraseCut: Language-based Image Segmentation in the Wild	CVPR 2020	[project]
CLEVR-Ref+	CLEVR-Ref+: Diagnosing Visual Reasoning with Referring Expressions	CVPR 2019	[project]
UNC	Modeling context in referring expressions	ECCV 2016	[dataset]
UNC+	Modeling context in referring expressions	ECCV 2016	[dataset]
Google-Ref	Generation and comprehension of unambiguous object descriptions	CVPR 2016	[dataset]
ReferIt	Referit game: Referring to objects in photographs of natural scenes	EMNLP 2014	[project]

2. Challenges

Name	Workshop	Date	Submission Link
1st MeViS Challenge	CVPR 2024 Workshop: Pixel-level Video Understanding in the Wild	May 2024	[CodaLab]
RVOS Challenge	ECCV 2024 Workshop: The 6th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge	Aug 2024	[CodaLab]

3. Traditional Referring Image Segmentation

Short name	Paper	Source	Code/Project Link
	Improving Target Presence and Plurality Recognition for Generalized Referring Image Segmentation	AAAI 2026	[webpage]
PixelRefer	PixelRefer: A Unified Framework for Spatio-Temporal Object Referring with Arbitrary Granularity	arxiv 25.10	[code]
CoPatch	CoPatch: Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation by Leveraging Untapped Spatial Knowledge in CLIP	arxiv 25.09	[code]
SaFiRe	SaFiRe: Saccade-Fixation Reiteration with Mamba for Referring Image Segmentation	NeurIPS 2025
UniPixel	UniPixel: Unified Object Referring and Segmentation for Pixel-Level Visual Reasoning	NeurIPS 2025	[code] [webpage]
RaAM	Region-aware Anchoring Mechanism for Efficient Referring Visual Grounding	ICCV 2025
Latent-VG	Latent Expression Generation for Referring Image Segmentation and Grounding	ICCV 2025
DeRIS	DeRIS: Decoupling Perception and Cognition for Enhanced Referring Image Segmentation through Loopback Synergy	ICCV 2025	[code]
WeakMCN	WeakMCN: Multi-task Collaborative Network for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation	CVPR 2025	[code]
HybridGL	Hybrid Global-Local Representation with Augmented Spatial Guidance for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2025	[code]
IteRPrimE	IteRPrimE: Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Iterative Grad-CAM Refinement and Primary Word Emphasis	AAAI 2025	[code]
DETRIS	Densely Connected Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation	AAAI 2025	[code]
VATEX	Vision-Aware Text Features in Referring Image Segmentation: From Object Understanding to Context Understanding	WACV 2025	[code] [webpage]
Shared-RIS	A Simple Baseline with Single-encoder for Referring Image Segmentation	arxiv 24.08	[code]
ASDA	Adaptive Selection based Referring Image Segmentation	ACM MM 2024	code
NeMo	Finding NeMo: Negative-mined Mosaic Augmentation for Referring Image Segmentation	ECCV 2024	[webpage] [code]
ReMamber	ReMamber: Referring Image Segmentation with Mamba Twister	ECCV 2024	[code]
GTMS	GTMS: A Gradient-driven Tree-guided Mask-free Referring Image Segmentation Method	ECCV 2024	[code]
SAM4MLLM	SAM4MLLM: Enhance Multi-Modal Large Language Model for Referring Expression Segmentation	ECCV 2024	[code]
Pseudo-RIS	Pseudo-RIS: Distinctive Pseudo-supervision Generation for Referring Image Segmentation	ECCV 2024	[code]
SafaRi	SafaRi: Adaptive Sequence Transformer for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Segmentation	ECCV 2024	[webpage]
CM-MaskSD	CM-MaskSD: Cross-Modality Masked Self-Distillation for Referring Image Segmentation	TMM 2024
Prompt-RIS	Prompt-Driven Referring Image Segmentation with Instance Contrasting	CVPR 2024
LQMFormer	LQMFormer: Language-aware Query Mask Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2024
PPT	Curriculum Point Prompting for Weakly-Supervised Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2024
GSVA	GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Models	CVPR 2024	[code]
RMSIN	Rotated Multi-Scale Interaction Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation	CVPR 2024	[code]
MRES	Unveiling Parts Beyond Objects: Towards Finer-Granularity Referring Expression Segmentation	CVPR 2024	[code] [webpage]
MagNet	Mask Grounding for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2024	[webpage]
LISA	LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model	CVPR 2024	[code]
RefSegformer	Towards Robust Referring Image Segmentation	TIP 2024	[code]
JMCELN	Referring Image Segmentation via Joint Mask Contextual Embedding Learning and Progressive Alignment Network	EMNLP 2023	[code]
CVMN	Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Referring Semantic Segmentation	ACM MM 2023	[code]
CARIS	CARIS: Context-Aware Referring Image Segmentation	ACM MM 2023	[code]
TAS	Text Augmented Spatial-aware Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation	EMNLP 2023
BKINet	Bilateral Knowledge Interaction Network for Referring Image Segmentation	TMM 2023	[code]
Group-RES	Advancing Referring Expression Segmentation Beyond Single Image	ICCV 2023	[code]
	Weakly Supervised Referring Image Segmentation with Intra-Chunk and Inter-Chunk Consistency	ICCV 2023
	Shatter and Gather: Learning Referring Image Segmentation with Text Supervision	ICCV 2023
TRIS	Referring Image Segmentation Using Text Supervision	ICCV 2023	[code]
RIS-DMMI	Beyond One-to-One: Rethinking the Referring Image Segmentation	ICCV 2023	[code]
ETRIS	Bridging Vision and Language Encoders: Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation	ICCV 2023	[code]
SEEM	Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once	arXiv 23.04	[code]
SLViT	SLViT: Scale-Wise Language-Guided Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation	IJCAI 2023	[code]
WiCo	WiCo: Win-win Cooperation of Bottom-up and Top-down Referring Image Segmentation	IJCAI 2023
M3Att	Multi-Modal Mutual Attention and Iterative Interaction for Referring Image Segmentation	TIP 2023
X-Decoder	X-Decoder: Generalized Decoding for Pixel, Image and Language	CVPR 2023	[code] [project]
Partial-RES	Learning to Segment Every Referring Object Point by Point	CVPR 2023	[code]
MCRES	Meta Compositional Referring Expression Segmentation	CVPR 2023
Global-Local CLIP	Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Global-Local Context Features	CVPR 2023	[code]
PolyFormer	PolyFormer: Referring Image Segmentation as Sequential Polygon Generation	CVPR 2023	[code] [project]
GRES	GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation	CVPR 2023	[code] [dataset] [project]
CGFormer	Contrastive Grouping with Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2023	[code]
SADLR	Semantics-Aware Dynamic Localization and Refinement for Referring Image Segmentation	AAAI 2023
R-RIS	Towards Robust Referring Image Segmentation	arXiv 22.09	[code] [project]
-	Learning From Box Annotations for Referring Image Segmentation	TNNLS 2022	[code]
-	Instance-Specific Feature Propagation for Referring Segmentation	TMM 2022
LAVT	LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2022	[code]
CRIS	CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2022	[code]
ReSTR	ReSTR: Convolution-free Referring Image Segmentation Using Transformers	CVPR 2022	[project]
TV-Net	Two-stage Visual Cues Enhancement Network for Referring Image Segmentation	ACM MM 2021	[code]
VLT	Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation	ICCV 2021	[code]
MDETR	MDETR - Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding	ICCV 2021	[code] [project]
CEFNet	Encoder Fusion Network with Co-Attention Embedding for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2021	[code]
BUSNet	Bottom-Up Shift and Reasoning for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2021	[code]
LTS	Locate then Segment: A Strong Pipeline for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2021
CGAN	Cascade Grouped Attention Network for Referring Expression Segmentation	ACM MM 2020
LSCM	Linguistic Structure Guided Context Modeling for Referring Image Segmentation	ECCV 2020	[code]
CMPC-Refseg	Referring Image Segmentation via Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension	CVPR 2020	[code]
BRINet	Bi-directional Relationship Inferring Network for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2020	[code]
PhraseCut	PhraseCut: Language-based Image Segmentation in the Wild	CVPR 2020	[code] [project]
MCN	Multi-task Collaborative Network for Joint Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation	CVPR 2020	[code]
-	Dual Convolutional LSTM Network for Referring Image Segmentation	TMM 2020
STEP	See-Through-Text Grouping for Referring Image Segmentation	ICCV 2019
lang2seg	Referring Expression Object Segmentation with Caption-Aware Consistency	BMVC 2019	[code]
CMSA	Cross-Modal Self-Attention Network for Referring Image Segmentation	CVPR 2019	[code]
KWA	Key-Word-Aware Network for Referring Expression Image Segmentation	ECCV 2018	[code]
DMN	Dynamic Multimodal Instance Segmentation Guided by Natural Language Queries	ECCV 2018	[code]
RRN	Referring Image Segmentation via Recurrent Refinement Networks	CVPR 2018	[code]
MAttNet	MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension	CVPR 2018	[code] [Demo]
RMI	Recurrent Multimodal Interaction for Referring Image Segmentation	ICCV 2017	[code]
LSTM-CNN	Segmentation from natural language expressions	ECCV 2016	[code] [project]

4. Interactive Referring Image Segmentation

Short name	Paper	Source	Code/Project Link
UniPixel	UniPixel: Unified Object Referring and Segmentation for Pixel-Level Visual Reasoning	NeurIPS 2025	[code] [webpage]
PhraseClick	PhraseClick: Toward Achieving Flexible Interactive Segmentation by Phrase and Click	ECCV 2020

5. Referring Video Object Segmentation

Short name	Paper	Source	Code/Project Link
PixelRefer	PixelRefer: A Unified Framework for Spatio-Temporal Object Referring with Arbitrary Granularity	arxiv 25.10	[code] [webpage]
UniPixel	UniPixel: Unified Object Referring and Segmentation for Pixel-Level Visual Reasoning	NeurIPS 2025	[code] [webpage]
MPG-SAM 2	MPG-SAM 2: Adapting SAM 2 with Mask Priors and Global Context for Referring Video Object Segmentation	ICCV 2025	[code]
ReferDINO	ReferDINO: Referring Video Object Segmentation with Visual Grounding Foundations	ICCV 2025	[code]
VD-IT	Exploring Pre-trained Text-to-Video Diffusion Models for Referring Video Object Segmentation	ECCV 2024	[code]
DsHmp	Decoupling Static and Hierarchical Motion Perception for Referring Video Segmentation	CVPR 2024	[code]
LoSh	LoSh: Long-Short Text Joint Prediction Network for Referring Video Object Segmentation	CVPR 2024	[code]
SOC	SOC: Semantic-Assisted Object Cluster for Referring Video Object Segmentation	NeurIPS 2023	[code]
Locater	Local-Global Context Aware Transformer for Language-Guided Video Segmentation	TPAMI 2023	[code] [dataset]
TempCD	Temporal Collection and Distribution for Referring Video Object Segmentation	ICCV 2023	[project] [code]
HTML	HTML: Hybrid Temporal-scale Multimodal Learning Framework for Referring Video Object Segmentation	ICCV 2023	[project]
LMPM	MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressions	ICCV 2023	[code] [project]
OnlineRefer	OnlineRefer: A Simple Online Baseline for Referring Video Object Segmentation	ICCV 2023	[code]
SgMg	Spectrum-guided Multi-granularity Referring Video Object Segmentation	ICCV 2023	[code]
R2VOS	Towards Robust Referring Video Object Segmentation with Cyclic Relational Consistency	ICCV 2023	[code]
MANet	Multi-Attention Network for Compressed Video Referring Object Segmentation	ACM MM 2022	[code]
MTTR	End-to-End Referring Video Object Segmentation with Multimodal Transformers	CVPR 2022	[code]
ReferFormer	Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation	CVPR 2022	[code]
LBDT	Language-Bridged Spatial-Temporal Interaction for Referring Video Object Segmentation	CVPR 2022	[code]
-	Multi-Level Representation Learning with Semantic Alignment for Referring Video Object Segmentation	CVPR 2022
YOFO	You Only Infer Once: Cross-Modal Meta-Transfer for Referring Video Object Segmentation	AAAI 2022
CITD	Rethinking Cross-modal Interaction from a Top-down Perspective for Referring Video Object Segmentation	CVPRW 2021
ClawCraneNet	ClawCraneNet: Leveraging Object-level Relation for Text-based Video Segmentation	arXiv 21.03
RefVOS	RefVOS: A Closer Look at Referring Expressions for Video Object Segmentation	arXiv 20.10
URVOS	URVOS: Unified Referring Video Object Segmentation Network with a Large-Scale Benchmark	ECCV 2020	[code]
	Video Object Segmentation with Language Referring Expressions	ACCV 2018

6. 3D Referring Segmentation

Short name	Paper	Source	Code/Project Link
OV-BIS	OV-BIS: Open-Vocabulary Boundary Guide Zero-Shot 3D Instance Segmentation	TMM 2025
X-RefSeg3D	X-RefSeg3D: Enhancing Referring 3D Instance Segmentation via Structured Cross-Modal Graph Neural Networks	AAAI 2024	[code]
3D-STMN	3D-STMN: Dependency-Driven Superpoint-Text Matching Network for End-to-End 3D Referring Expression Segmentation	AAAI 2024	[code]
SegPoint	SegPoint: Segment Any Point Cloud via Large Language Model	ECCV 2024	[project]
3D-GRES	3D-GRES: Generalized 3D Referring Expression Segmentation	ACM MM 2024	[code]
RefMask3D	RefMask3D: Language-Guided Transformer for 3D Referring Segmentation	ACM MM 2024	[code]
TGNN	Text-Guided Graph Neural Networks for Referring 3D Instance Segmentation	AAAI 2021
InstanceRefer	InstanceRefer: Cooperative Holistic Understanding for Visual Grounding on Point Clouds through Instance Multi-level Contextual Referring	ICCV 2021	[code]

7. Referring Image Segmentation in Specific Domains

Short name	Paper	Source	Code/Project Link
RS2-SAM2	RS2-SAM2: Customized SAM2 for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation	AAAI 2026	[code]
SurgRef	Where It Moves, It Matters: Referring Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Motion	AAAI 2026	[code]
RIS-LAD	RIS-LAD: A Benchmark and Model for Referring Low-Altitude Drone Image Segmentation	AAAI 2026	[code]

image-segmentation

instance-segmentation

language

referring-expressions

referring-image-segmentation

referring-segmentation

segmentation-datasets

semantic-segmentation

text-based

text-based-segmentation

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