# Temporally-Constrained Video Reasoning Segmentation and Automated Benchmark Construction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16718 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16718/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Temporal Memory Relation Network for Workflow Recognition from Surgical Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16327/) (2021)
- [MVOR: A Multi-view RGB-D Operating Room Dataset for 2D and 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08180/) (2018)
- [A spatio-temporal network for video semantic segmentation in surgical videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11052/) (2023)
- [Reasoning Segmentation for Images and Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18816/) (2025)
- [Position: Foundation Models Need Digital Twin Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03798/) (2025)
- [Operating Room Workflow Analysis via Reasoning Segmentation over Digital Twins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21054/) (2025)
- [RVTBench: A Benchmark for Visual Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11838/) (2025)
- [SEDMamba: Enhancing Selective State Space Modelling with Bottleneck Mechanism and Fine-to-Coarse Temporal Fusion for Efficient Error Detection in Robot-Assisted Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15920/) (2024)
- [Towards Intelligent Speech Assistants in Operating Rooms: A Multimodal Model for Surgical Workflow Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14576/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Text-Driven Reasoning Video Editing via Reinforcement Learning on Digital Twin Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14100/) (2025)
- [Fast Reasoning Segmentation for Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12368/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional approaches to video segmentation are confined to predefined object categories and cannot identify out-of-vocabulary objects, let alone objects that are not identified explicitly but only referred to implicitly in complex text queries. This shortcoming limits the utility for video segmentation in complex and variable scenarios, where a closed set of object categories is difficult to define and where users may not know the exact object category that will appear in the video. Such scenarios can arise in operating room video analysis, where different health systems may use different workflows and instrumentation, requiring flexible solutions for video analysis. Reasoning segmentation (RS) now offers promise towards such a solution, enabling natural language text queries as interaction for identifying object to segment. However, existing video RS formulation assume that target objects remain contextually relevant throughout entire video sequences. This assumption is inadequate for real-world scenarios in which objects of interest appear, disappear or change relevance dynamically based on temporal context, such as surgical instruments that become relevant only during specific procedural phases or anatomical structures that gain importance at particular moments during surgery. Our first contribution is the introduction of temporally-constrained video reasoning segmentation, a novel task formulation that requires models to implicitly infer when target objects become contextually relevant based on text queries that incorporate temporal reasoning. Since manual annotation of temporally-constrained video RS datasets would be expensive and limit scalability, our second contribution is an innovative automated benchmark construction method. Finally, we present TCVideoRSBenchmark, a temporally-constrained video RS dataset containing 52 samples using the videos from the MVOR dataset.