Instead of our usual month-by-month roundup, this final Digest of 2025 looks back at the core product features and notable CVAT moments we shipped and celebrated this year.
From agentic automation to faster video tracking, stronger QA, better analytics, safer API access, and smoother 3D workflows—here’s the 2025 highlight reel.
#1 Agentic automation: AI Agents and ML models integration
2025 marked a shift in how automation works in CVAT. Instead of treating ML as an add-on, CVAT introduced AI Agents—a way to plug your own models directly into annotation workflows.
AI Agents allow teams to run auto-annotation using models hosted on their own infrastructure, while keeping annotators inside CVAT. This makes it easier to automate labeling, reuse existing ML pipelines, and scale annotation without changing tools.
We also shared practical examples of how AI Agents work with popular model ecosystems, including SAM 2 and Ultralytics YOLO, showing how agentic labeling fits into real-world workflows.
Related posts:
#2 SAM 2 for automated video object tracking
Video annotation saw a major upgrade in 2025 with the introduction of SAM 2–based tracking.
For CVAT Enterprise, SAM 2 is available as a native tracking solution designed for production-scale video annotation. It significantly reduces manual work when tracking objects across frames and is optimized for large video datasets.
For CVAT Online users, SAM 2 tracking is available via AI Agents. This gives teams flexibility to run the tracking model in their infrastructure while keeping annotation workflows centralized in CVAT.
Related posts:
#3 Faster QA with honeypots and immediate job feedback
As annotation teams scale, quality control needs to happen continuously, not only at the final review stage. In 2025, CVAT introduced features that help teams detect issues earlier and reduce rework.
Honeypots use pre-annotated reference data mixed into regular jobs to automatically evaluate annotation quality. This makes it possible to monitor quality across the pipeline using a limited but reliable set of ground-truth samples.
Immediate Job Feedback complements this by providing quality insights right after a job is completed. Annotators can fix issues immediately, without waiting for delayed review cycles.
Related posts:
#4 Advanced annotation analytics for teams who want visibility
To give teams better visibility into how work gets done, CVAT introduced advanced analytics. It provides metrics such as working time, annotation speed, object counts, label usage, and productivity trends. Reports can be refreshed when needed, making it easier to monitor performance, identify bottlenecks, and plan resources.
Related post:
#5 Safer automation with Personal Access Tokens for API/SDK/CLI
Automation is a core CVAT use case, and in 2025 we made it more secure. Personal Access Tokens (PATs) are a modern way to authenticate to CVAT’s API/SDK/CLI without reusing passwords or relying on legacy keys. You can scope permissions, set expirations, and revoke tokens without disrupting other integrations.
Related post:
#6 UX and usability improvements
Alongside major features, 2025 included a series of usability improvements aimed at saving time in everyday work.
Bulk actions make it possible to manage multiple resources at once, reducing repetitive operations in large workspaces.
Project copying workflows are now supported through project backup and restore, allowing teams to reuse configurations, templates, and structures across projects.
Keyboard shortcut customization gives power users full control over shortcuts, with support for global and workspace-specific settings and built-in conflict detection.
Related posts:
#7 3D / point cloud annotation improvements
Point cloud annotation workflows received focused improvements in 2025, aimed at stability and precision during long annotation sessions.
Updates included smoother navigation, more predictable zoom behavior, improved object focusing, better control point handling, and more stable camera behavior across views.
Related post:
#8 CVAT Academy launch
In 2025, CVAT launched CVAT Academy, a dedicated learning space for anyone who wants to build annotation skills faster.
CVAT Academy offers hands-on training covering core annotation concepts as well as more advanced workflows, helping individuals and teams onboard more efficiently and work more consistently.
And that's a wrap on 2025. Thank you for choosing CVAT for your dataset labeling this year.
Whether you use CVAT Online or CVAT Enterprise in production, contribute to the CVAT Community open-source edition, or build your own workflows on top of CVAT, thank you for being with us.
See you in 2026!
.svg)
.png)
.png)
.png)