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DRA-SAM: Disagreement-Driven Referential Active SAM for Low-Altitude Drone Referring Segmentation

Summary

DRA-SAM introduces a disagreement-driven framework for referring segmentation in low-altitude drone imagery. A lightweight EvidenceScorer estimates beliefs over candidate masks and an unresolved state, while a training-free Referential Disagreement LOOK policy selects a crop for a second inference pass through the same SAM3-I backbone. The method achieves state-of-the-art results on most metrics across RIS-LAD and UAVid-RIS, with particularly strong gains on aerial targets occupying less than 1% of an image.

SourcearXiv Computer VisionAuthor: Jisheng Dang, Huaiyuan Peng, Wencan Zhang, Bimei Wang, Jingwen Zhao, Wenjun Ma, Hong Peng, Bin Hu, Qi Tian, Tat-Seng Chua
DRA-SAM: Disagreement-Driven Referential Active SAM for Low-Altitude Drone Referring Segmentation
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[Submitted on 19 Oct 2026]

Title:DRA-SAM: Disagreement-Driven Referential Active SAM for Low-Altitude Drone Referring Segmentation

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Abstract:Referring segmentation in low-altitude drone imagery requires distinguishing small, visually similar instances under complex linguistic and spatial constraints. Global inference may yield multiple plausible masks or leave the intended referent insufficiently represented, motivating selective local re-inference. We propose DRA-SAM, a disagreement-driven framework that allocates an additional inference pass according to competing referential hypotheses and an unresolved state. A lightweight EvidenceScorer estimates beliefs over existing candidates and the unresolved state. A training-free Referential Disagreement LOOK policy balances belief-weighted candidate competition and unresolved-region coverage to select a crop for local re-inference. The same benchmark-adapted SAM3-I backbone processes the selected region, and the resulting evidence updates existing hypotheses and introduces new candidates. Among the compared methods, DRA-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on six of seven test metrics on both RIS-LAD and UAVid-RIS, including mIoU and [email protected]@0.9, and on all seven RIS-LAD validation metrics. On RIS-LAD, DRA-SAM improves the matched global SAM3-I baseline from 49.55 to 52.34 mIoU and from 46.80 to 58.05 [email protected]. On UAVid-RIS, the independently adapted DRA-SAM achieves 73.26 mIoU and 86.86 [email protected]. Controlled crop-policy comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of disagreement-guided crop selection, while target-size analysis reveals particularly pronounced gains for aerial targets occupying less than 1% of an image. These results establish referential disagreement as an effective criterion for allocating local inference. Code is available at this https URL.

Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures

Subjects:

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as: arXiv:2610.33057 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2610.33057v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.33057

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Huaiyuan Peng [view email] [v1] Mon, 19 Oct 2026 08:56:35 UTC (26,774 KB)

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Key points

  • Adds a selective local re-inference pass driven by competing referential hypotheses and an unresolved state
  • Uses a training-free LOOK policy that balances belief-weighted candidate competition with unresolved-region coverage to choose crops
  • Improves the matched global SAM3-I baseline on RIS-LAD from 49.55 to 52.34 mIoU and from 46.80 to 58.05 [email protected]
  • Gains are most pronounced for aerial targets smaller than 1% of the image area

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