DualEraser: Joint Video Object and Effect Removal via Balanced Text-Mask Guidance and Decoupled Locator-Preserver

Abstract

Video object removal frequently struggles to eliminate target objects and their associated complex physical effects (e.g., smoke and light) in real-world scenes. We attribute this challenge to a fundamental semantic--pixel conflict, which manifests at two aspects: condition-level modality dissonance and optimization-level objective entanglement. In terms of conditioning, modality dissonance emerges from single-modality information incompleteness and cross-modal dominance imbalance. During optimization, two conflicting objectives---high-level semantic erasure and pixel-level background preservation---are inextricably entangled within a single model. To address these conflicts, we propose DualEraser, a novel framework for joint video object and effect removal. First, a Bipartite Text prompt and a Multi-Conditional Capability Elicitation (MCCE) mechanism explicitly inject effect semantics and further leverage multimodal priors to address the limitations of individual modalities. Second, a Learnable Deep CFG Fusion (LD-CFG) module adaptively balances the relative dominance between the text and mask conditions. Finally, we introduce a decoupled expert architecture comprising a Locator for semantic erasure and a Preserver for background pixel alignment to break the objective entanglement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DualEraser achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance on standard benchmarks (e.g., gains of 2.16 dB and 1.44 dB on ROSE and VOR-Eval, respectively), while enabling robust removal of complex effects in open-world videos. https://cyqii.github.io/DualEraser.github.io/