# CR-Seg: Attention-Guided and CoT-Enhanced Coarse-to-Refined Reasoning Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03564 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03564/

## 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 12 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Deep multi-scale video prediction beyond mean square error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05440/) (2015)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)
- [VisionReasoner: Unified Reasoning-Integrated Visual Perception via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12081/) (2025)
- [PixelThink: Towards Efficient Chain-of-Pixel Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23727/) (2025)
- [GUI-AIMA: Aligning Intrinsic Multimodal Attention with a Context Anchor for GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00810/) (2025)
- [Evolving, Not Training: Zero-Shot Reasoning Segmentation via Evolutionary Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24702/) (2025)
- [Boundary-Aware Network for Fast and High-Accuracy Portrait Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03814/) (2019)
- [DR2Seg: Decomposed Two-Stage Rollouts for Efficient Reasoning Segmentation in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09981/) (2026)
- [Dr. Seg: Revisiting GRPO Training for Visual Large Language Models through Perception-Oriented Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00152/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reasoning segmentation aims to segment target objects described by complex language through joint visual-textual reasoning. Existing methods typically rely on either learned semantic tokens to bridge Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and segmentation models, suffering from difficult cross-modal alignment, or explicit spatial prompts such as bounding boxes, which may lose holistic response semantics. To address these limitations, we propose Attention-Guided and CoT-Enhanced Coarse-to-Refined Reasoning Segmentation, termed CR-Seg, a two-stage framework for coarse-to-refined reasoning segmentation. Specifically, we design an Extract Attention Maps and Points (EAP) module to extract attention maps for coarse target localization and select informative points, both of which are fed into SAM for mask refinement. To alleviate reasoning--answer inconsistency, we further introduce Global-to-Local Chain-of-Thought (GLCoT), which guides the model to reason progressively from global scene context to local target details. Extensive experiments on reasoning segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CR-Seg.