# Fast Reasoning Segmentation for Images and Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12368 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12368/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 38 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08046/) (2023)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [Specializing Smaller Language Models towards Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12726/) (2023)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)
- [Implicit Chain of Thought Reasoning via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01460/) (2023)
- [OmniTokenizer: A Joint Image-Video Tokenizer for Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09399/) (2024)
- [One Token to Seg Them All: Language Instructed Reasoning Segmentation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19603/) (2024)
- [LISA++: An Improved Baseline for Reasoning Segmentation with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17240/) (2023)
- [LLM-Seg: Bridging Image Segmentation and Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08767/) (2024)
- [Towards Reasoning Ability of Small Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11569/) (2025)
- [DDK: Distilling Domain Knowledge for Efficient Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16154/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Distillation and Dataset Distillation of Large Language Models: Emerging Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14772/) (2025)
- [CoReS: Orchestrating the Dance of Reasoning and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05673/) (2024)
- [SegLLM: Multi-round Reasoning Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18923/) (2024)
- [Reasoning Segmentation for Images and Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18816/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reasoning segmentation enables open-set object segmentation via implicit text queries, therefore serving as a foundation for embodied agents that should operate autonomously in real-world environments. However, existing methods for reasoning segmentation require multimodal large language models with billions of parameters that exceed the computational capabilities of edge devices that typically deploy the embodied AI systems. Distillation offers a pathway to compress these models while preserving their capabilities. Yet, existing distillation approaches fail to transfer the multi-step reasoning capabilities that reasoning segmentation demands, as they focus on matching output predictions and intermediate features rather than preserving reasoning chains. The emerging paradigm of reasoning over digital twin representations presents an opportunity for more effective distillation by re-framing the problem. Consequently, we propose FastReasonSeg, which employs digital twin representations that decouple perception from reasoning to enable more effective distillation. Our distillation scheme first relies on supervised fine-tuning on teacher-generated reasoning chains. Then it is followed by reinforcement fine-tuning with joint rewards evaluating both segmentation accuracy and reasoning quality alignment. Experiments on two video (JiTBench, RVTBench) and two image benchmarks (ReasonSeg, LLM-Seg40K) demonstrate that our FastReasonSeg achieves state-of-the-art reasoning segmentation performance. Moreover, the distilled 0.6B variant outperforms models with 20 times more parameters while achieving 7.79 FPS throughput with only 2.1GB memory consumption. This efficiency enables deployment in resource-constrained environments to enable real-time reasoning segmentation.