  Segment Anything Model (SAM) has emerged as a powerful tool for numerous
vision applications. A key component that drives the impressive performance for
zero-shot transfer and high versatility is a super large Transformer model
trained on the extensive high-quality SA-1B dataset. While beneficial, the huge
computation cost of SAM model has limited its applications to wider real-world
applications. To address this limitation, we propose EfficientSAMs,
light-weight SAM models that exhibits decent performance with largely reduced
complexity. Our idea is based on leveraging masked image pretraining, SAMI,
which learns to reconstruct features from SAM image encoder for effective
visual representation learning. Further, we take SAMI-pretrained light-weight
image encoders and mask decoder to build EfficientSAMs, and finetune the models
on SA-1B for segment anything task. We perform evaluations on multiple vision
tasks including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation,
and semantic object detection, and find that our proposed pretraining method,
SAMI, consistently outperforms other masked image pretraining methods. On
segment anything task such as zero-shot instance segmentation, our
EfficientSAMs with SAMI-pretrained lightweight image encoders perform favorably
with a significant gain (e.g., ~4 AP on COCO/LVIS) over other fast SAM models.
