SAM3-LiteText: An Anatomical Study of the SAM3 Text Encoder for Efficient Vision-Language Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the redundancy in current vision-language segmentation text encoders and introduces SAM3-LiteText, a lightweight, distilled encoder that significantly reduces parameters while maintaining performance.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale anatomical analysis of text prompting in segmentation models and proposes a compact, efficient text encoder based on knowledge distillation.

Findings

Redundant usage of context windows and vocabulary in prompts.

Low-dimensional manifold structure in text embeddings.

Up to 88% reduction in text encoder parameters with maintained performance.

Abstract

Vision-language segmentation models such as SAM3 enable flexible, prompt-driven visual grounding, but inherit large, general-purpose text encoders originally designed for open-ended language understanding. In practice, segmentation prompts are short, structured, and semantically constrained, leading to substantial over-provisioning in text encoder capacity and persistent computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we perform a large-scale anatomical analysis of text prompting in vision-language segmentation, covering 404,796 real prompts across multiple benchmarks. Our analysis reveals severe redundancy: most context windows are underutilized, vocabulary usage is highly sparse, and text embeddings lie on low-dimensional manifold despite high-dimensional representations. Motivated by these findings, we propose SAM3-LiteText, a lightweight text encoding framework that replaces the original SAM3 text encoder with a compact MobileCLIP student that is optimized by knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on image and video segmentation benchmarks show that SAM3-LiteText reduces text encoder parameters by up to 88%, substantially reducing static memory footprint, while maintaining segmentation performance comparable to the original model. Code: https://github.com/SimonZeng7108/efficientsam3/tree/sam3_litetext.