Vision & Multimodal Nov 2025 · #5 most cited · 711 citations

SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts

Nicolas Carion et al.

arXiv:2511.16719

In short

SAM 3 finds, outlines and tracks every instance of a concept in images and video, prompted by a short phrase like “yellow school bus” or by example images. It is trained on a data engine that produced four million unique concept labels, and ships with a new benchmark.

Why it matters

Segmentation moves from “click on the thing” to “name the thing”, doubling accuracy on this task.

Read first

The 3 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 25 ideas · basics first
  1. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  2. Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from examples paired with the correct answer, so a model can predict answers for new inputs it hasn't seen.

  3. Classification ✓ understood

    A supervised learning task where the model assigns each input to one of a fixed set of categories, such as spam or not spam.

  4. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  5. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  6. Computer Vision ✓ understood

    The field of AI that gets computers to extract meaning from images and video: what is in them, where it is, and how it moves.

  7. Semantic Segmentation · read first ✓ understood

    Classifying every pixel in an image into categories, creating a pixel-level understanding of scenes.

  8. Bounding Box ✓ understood

    A rectangular box defined by coordinates that localizes an object in an image, used in object detection.

  9. Object Detection · read first ✓ understood

    Finding every object of interest in an image and giving each a class label, a confidence score and a bounding box.

  10. Natural Language Processing ✓ understood

    The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.

  11. Token ✓ understood

    The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.

  12. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  13. Language Modeling ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  14. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  15. Training ✓ understood

    The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.

  16. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  17. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  18. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  19. Feature ✓ understood

    A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.

  20. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  21. Embedding ✓ understood

    A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.

  22. Attention Mechanism ✓ understood

    A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.

  23. Transformer ✓ understood

    A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.

  24. Large Language Model ✓ understood

    A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.

  25. Multimodal Model · read first ✓ understood

    Models processing multiple data types (text, images, audio) jointly, like GPT-4V, Gemini, or CLIP.

In the frontier

Rank
#5 of 100
Citations
711
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Nov 2025

Topics: Vision-language models , Video understanding , Data and synthetic generation

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

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