Fast SAM2 with Text-Driven Token Pruning
By: Avilasha Mandal, Chaoning Zhang, Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari, Xudong Wang, Jiaquan Zhang, Caiyan Qin, Guoqing Wang, Yang Yang, Heng Tao Shen
Published: 2025-12-24
View on arXiv →Abstract
Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), a vision foundation model has significantly advanced in prompt-driven video object segmentation, yet their practical deployment remains limited by the high computational and memory cost of processing dense visual tokens across time. In this work, we introduce a text-guided token pruning framework that improves inference efficiency by selectively reducing token density prior to temporal propagation, without modifying the underlying segmentation architecture. Extensive experiments across multiple challenging video segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that post-encoder token pruning provides a practical and effective pathway to efficient, prompt-aware video segmentation, achieving up to 42.50 percent faster inference and 37.41 percent lower GPU memory usage compared to the unpruned baseline SAM2, while preserving competitive J and F performance. These results highlight the potential of early token selection to improve the scalability of transformer-based video segmentation systems for real-time and resource-constrained applications.