Unleashing the Temporal-Spatial Reasoning Capacity of GPT for Training-Free Audio and Language Referenced Video Object Segmentation

In this paper, we propose an Audio-Language-Referenced SAM 2 (AL-Ref-SAM 2) pipeline to explore the training-free paradigm for audio and language-referenced video object segmentation, namely AVS and RVOS tasks. The intuitive solution leverages GroundingDINO to identify the target object from a single frame and SAM 2 to segment the identified object throughout the video, which is less robust to spatiotemporal variations due to a lack of video context exploration. Thus, in our AL-Ref-SAM 2 pipeline, we propose a novel GPT-assisted Pivot Selection (GPT-PS) module to instruct GPT-4 to perform two-step temporal-spatial reasoning for sequentially selecting pivot frames and pivot boxes, thereby providing SAM 2 with a high-quality initial object prompt. Within GPT-PS, two task-specific Chain-of-Thought prompts are designed to unleash GPT’s temporal-spatial reasoning capacity by guiding GPT to make selections based on a comprehensive understanding of video and reference information. Furthermore, we propose a Language-Binded Reference Unification (LBRU) module to convert audio signals into language-formatted references, thereby unifying the formats of AVS and RVOS tasks in the same pipeline. Extensive experiments show that our training-free AL-Ref-SAM 2 pipeline achieves performances comparable to or even better than fully-supervised fine-tuning methods.