# ContourVLA: A Closed-Loop Perception-Action Contour Policy for Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12107 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12107/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
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- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)
- [LaSagnA: Language-based Segmentation Assistant for Complex Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08506/) (2024)
- [VisionReasoner: Unified Reasoning-Integrated Visual Perception via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12081/) (2025)
- [Seg-R1: Segmentation Can Be Surprisingly Simple with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22624/) (2025)
- [KVPO: ODE-Native GRPO for Autoregressive Video Alignment via KV Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14278/) (2026)
- [RoboStereo: Dual-Tower 4D Embodied World Models for Unified Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12639/) (2026)
- [MIND-V: Hierarchical World Model for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with RL-based Physical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06628/) (2025)
- [When Should the Teacher Move? Temporal Coupling and Stability in Self On-Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03532/) (2026)
- [SegCompass: Exploring Interpretable Alignment with Sparse Autoencoders for Enhanced Reasoning Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22658/) (2026)
- [Learning Visual Spatial Planning from Symbolic State via Modality-Gap-Aware Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06076/) (2026)
- [TALENT: Target-aware Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00609/) (2026)
- [Early Semantic Grounding in Image Editing Models for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13122/) (2026)
- [Credit the Right Box: Marginal Contribution Assignment for Structured Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01055/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized referring expression segmentation (GRES) requires dynamically balancing high-level semantics for identifying a variable number of language-specified referents with fine-grained visual evidence for precise boundary delineation. This requirement challenges existing cascaded vision-language architectures, which typically rely on static feature interfaces and single-pass mask prediction, limiting adaptive perception and geometric correction. We introduce ContourVLA, a vision-language-action policy that recasts GRES as a closed-loop visuomotor process, in which editable contours serve as explicit policy states that condition multimodal perception and are updated by geometric action chunks. Evolution-Aware Semantic Scheduling (EASS) couples contour-guided bidirectional boundary sampling with state-conditioned routing of multilevel multimodal features, adapting perception to each contour state. Following supervised initialization, Dustbin-Augmented Entropic Credit Transport GRPO (DECT-GRPO) jointly optimizes discrete grounding and continuous contour actions with instance-level credits. Its rollout rewards and credits are derived from soft prediction-target correspondences that account for false positives and missed targets. ContourVLA improves gIoU over the strongest evaluated baselines by 8.7, 2.8, and 2.7 points on gRefCOCO val, testA, and testB, respectively, and achieves the highest mIoU across all eight RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg splits.