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From SAM 1's 11-million-image data engine to SAM 2's memory-based video tracking, MSL’s Segment Anything project has redefined what's possible in computer vision. Now SAM 3 takes the next leap: concept segmentation—prompting with natural language like "yellow school bus" or "tablecloth" to detect, segment, and track every instance across images and video, in real time, with human-level exhaustivity. And with the latest SAM Audio (https://x.com/aiatmeta/status/2000980784425931067?s=46), SAM can now even segment audio output!
We sat down with Nikhila Ravi (SAM lead at Meta) and Pengchuan Zhang (SAM 3 researcher) alongside Joseph Nelson (CEO, Roboflow) to unpack how SAM 3 unifies interactive segmentation, open-vocabulary detection, video tracking, and more into a single model that runs in 30ms on images and scales to real-time video on multi-GPU setups. We dig into the data engine that automated exhaustive annotation from two minutes per image down to 25 seconds using AI verifiers fine-tuned on Llama, the new SACO (Segment Anything with Concepts) benchmark with 200,000+ unique concepts vs. the previous 1.2k, how SAM 3 separates recognition from localization with a presence token, why decoupling the detector and tracker was critical to preserve object identity in video, how SAM 3 Agents unlock complex visual reasoning by pairing SAM 3 with multimodal LLMs like Gemini, and the real-world impact: 106 million smart polygons created on Roboflow saving humanity an estimated 130+ years of labeling time across fields from cancer research to underwater trash cleanup to autonomous vehicle perception.
We discuss:
What SAM 3 is: a unified model for concept-prompted segmentation, detection, and tracking in images and video using atomic visual concepts like "purple umbrella" or "watering can"
How concept prompts work: short text phrases that find all instances of a category without manual clicks, plus visual exemplars (boxes, clicks) to refine and adapt on the fly
Real-time performance: 30ms per image (100 detected objects on H200), 10 objects on 2×H200 video, 28 on 4×, 64 on 8×, with parallel inference and "fast mode" tracking
The SACO benchmark: 200,000+ unique concepts vs. 1.2k in prior benchmarks, designed to capture the diversity of natural language and reach human-level exhaustivity
The data engine: from 2 minutes per image (all-human) to 45 seconds (model-in-loop proposals) to 25 seconds (AI verifiers for mask quality and exhaustivity checks), fine-tuned on Llama 3.2
Why exhaustivity is central: every instance must be found, verified by AI annotators, and manually corrected only when the model misses—automating the hardest part of segmentation at scale
Architecture innovations: presence token to separate recognition ("is it in the image?") from localization ("where is it?"), decoupled detector and tracker to preserve identity-agnostic detection vs. identity-preserving tracking
Building on Meta's ecosystem: Perception Encoder, DINO v2 detector, Llama for data annotation, and SAM 2's memory-based tracking backbone
SAM 3 Agents: using SAM 3 as a visual tool for multimodal LLMs (Gemini, Llama) to solve complex visual reasoning tasks like "find the bigger character" or "what distinguishes male from female in this image"
Fine-tuning with as few as 10 examples: domain adaptation for specialized use cases (Waymo vehicles, medical imaging, OCR-heavy scenes) and the outsized impact of negative examples
Real-world impact at Roboflow: 106M smart polygons created, saving 130+ years of labeling time across cancer research, underwater trash cleanup, autonomous drones, industrial automation, and more
—
MSL FAIR team
Nikhila: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilaravi/
Pengchuan: https://pzzhang.github.io/pzzhang/
Joseph Nelson
X: https://x.com/josephofiowa
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephofiowa/
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