SAM 3 vs SAM-CLIP

Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.

Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.

SAM-CLIP is a unified vision foundation model introduced by researchers at Apple and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in October 2023. It merges two popular vision foundation models — Meta's Segment Anything Model (SAM) and OpenAI's CLIP — into a single shared Vision Transformer backbone through a combination of multi-task learning, continual learning, and teacher-student distillation. The method requires only a small fraction of the original pretraining datasets and demonstrates that complementary capabilities from distinct foundation models can be consolidated without retraining from scratch, reducing the storage and compute cost of running both models in inference.

The resulting model retains SAM's zero-shot segmentation ability and CLIP's zero-shot classification and image-text retrieval, while introducing new capabilities the individual models lacked. SAM-CLIP establishes state-of-the-art results on zero-shot semantic segmentation across five benchmarks, improving mean IoU by 6.8 points on Pascal VOC and 5.9 points on COCO-Stuff over prior specialized models. The paper was accepted at the UniReps Workshop at NeurIPS 2023 and the eLVM Workshop at CVPR 2024. Apple has published the research but has not released model weights or inference code publicly.