mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Guideline-Consistent Segmentation via Multi-Agent Refinement

arXiv 2509.04687 ↗First posted 4 Sep 2025cs.CVcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic segmentation in real-world applications often requires not only accurate masks but also strict adherence to textual labeling guidelines. These guidelines are typically complex and long, and both human and automated labeling often fail to follow them faithfully. Traditional approaches depend on expensive task-specific retraining that must be repeated as the guidelines evolve. Although recent open-vocabulary segmentation methods excel with simple prompts, they often fail when confronted with sets of paragraph-length guidelines that specify intricate segmentation rules. To address this, we introduce a multi-agent, training-free framework that coordinates general-purpose vision-language models within an iterative Worker-Supervisor refinement architecture. The Worker performs the segmentation, the Supervisor critiques it against the retrieved guidelines, and a lightweight reinforcement learning stop policy decides when to terminate the loop, ensuring guideline-consistent masks while balancing resource use. Evaluated on the Waymo and ReasonSeg datasets, our method notably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating strong generalization and instruction adherence.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 24 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2025.

Builds on

24 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Visual Agents as Fast and Slow Thinkers16 Aug

Other references · 23

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,713
  3. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  4. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,442
  5. 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,332
  6. 2018Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentationcited by 3,223
  7. 2023Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Trainingcited by 3,109
  8. 2017Billion-scale similarity search with GPUscited by 2,497
  9. 2019Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Datasetcited by 2,451
  10. 2025Gemma 3 Technical Reportcited by 1,824
  11. 2023HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Facecited by 1,190
  12. 2024Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Taskscited by 929
11 more
  1. 2015Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptionscited by 904
  2. 2020Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillationcited by 593
  3. 2022Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIPcited by 565
  4. 2023Segment Everything Everywhere All at Oncecited by 548
  5. 2024YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detectioncited by 503
  6. 2018DeepGlobe 2018: A Challenge to Parse the Earth through Satellite Imagescited by 277
  7. 2025Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcementcited by 239
  8. 2024Contrastive Region Guidance: Improving Grounding in Vision-Language Models without Trainingcited by 64
  9. 2021Iterative Shrinking for Referring Expression Grounding Using Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 20
  10. 2024Can Large Vision-Language Models Correct Semantic Grounding Errors By Themselves?cited by 20
  11. 2024ScanFormer: Referring Expression Comprehension by Iteratively Scanningcited by 18

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

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Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025RSAgent: Learning to Reason and Act for Text-Guided Segmentation via Multi-Turn Tool Invocations
  2. 2025Towards Agentic AI for Multimodal-Guided Video Object Segmentation
  3. 2026Seg-Agent: Test-Time Multimodal Reasoning for Training-Free Language-Guided Segmentation
  4. 2025SynthSeg-Agents: Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Zero-Shot Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
  5. 2024Image Augmentation Agent for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
  6. 2026B-GRTO: Bootstrapped Group Relative Tool Optimization for Referring Segmentation
  7. 2024AlignSAM: Aligning Segment Anything Model to Open Context via Reinforcement Learning
  8. 2025LENS: Learning to Segment Anything with Unified Reinforced Reasoning