InterRVOS: Interaction-Aware Referring Video Object Segmentation

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment objects in a video described by a natural language expression.However, most existing approaches focus only on the referred object (typically the actor), even when the expression clearly describes an interaction involving multiple objects with distinct roles. In this paper, we introduce Interaction-Aware Referring Video Object Segmentation (InterRVOS), a novel task that focuses on explicit interaction modeling by requiring separate segmentation of actor and target objects.This formulation enables fine-grained understanding of object relationships, as many video events are defined by such interactions rather than individual objects. We present InterRVOS-127K, a large-scale dataset of over 127K automatically annotated expressions with distinct actor-target mask pairs, and propose ReVIOSa, a MLLM-based architecture that introduces interaction-aware special tokens and attention mask loss (AML) to enhance interaction-aware segmentation. We also propose a new evaluation protocol that separately evaluates actor and target segmentation for more accurate role distinction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that ReVIOSa outperforms existing baselines on the proposed InterRVOS-127K benchmark, with further analyses validating the necessity and effectiveness of both ReVIOSa and InterRVOS-127K. Code and datasets will be made publicly available.