Reasoning Segmentation for Images and Videos: A Survey

Reasoning Segmentation (RS) aims to delineate objects based on implicit text queries, the interpretation of which requires reasoning and knowledge integration. Unlike the traditional formulation of segmentation problems that relies on fixed semantic categories or explicit prompting, RS bridges the gap between visual perception and human-like reasoning capabilities, facilitating more intuitive human-AI interaction through natural language. Our work presents the first comprehensive survey of RS for image and video processing, examining 26 state-of-the-art methods together with a review of the corresponding evaluation metrics, as well as 29 datasets and benchmarks. We also explore existing applications of RS across diverse domains and identify their potential extensions. Finally, we identify current research gaps and highlight promising future directions.

RVTBench: A Benchmark for Visual Reasoning Tasks

Visual reasoning, the capability to interpret visual input in response to implicit text query through multi-step reasoning, remains a challenge for deep learning models due to the lack of relevant benchmarks. Previous work in visual reasoning has primarily focused on reasoning segmentation, where models aim to segment objects based on implicit text queries. This paper introduces reasoning visual tasks (RVTs), a unified formulation that extends beyond traditional video reasoning segmentation to a diverse family of visual language reasoning problems, which can therefore accommodate multiple output formats including bounding boxes, natural language descriptions, and question-answer pairs. Correspondingly, we identify the limitations in current benchmark construction methods that rely solely on large language models (LLMs), which inadequately capture complex spatial-temporal relationships and multi-step reasoning chains in video due to their reliance on token representation, resulting in benchmarks with artificially limited reasoning complexity. To address this limitation, we propose a novel automated RVT benchmark construction pipeline that leverages digital twin (DT) representations as structured intermediaries between perception and the generation of implicit text queries. Based on this method, we construct RVTBench, a RVT benchmark containing 3,896 queries of over 1.2 million tokens across four types of RVT (segmentation, grounding, VQA and summary), three reasoning categories (semantic, spatial, and temporal), and four increasing difficulty levels, derived from 200 video sequences. Finally, we propose RVTagent, an agent framework for RVT that allows for zero-shot generalization across various types of RVT without task-specific fine-tuning.

Online Reasoning Video Segmentation with Just-in-Time Digital Twins

Reasoning segmentation (RS) aims to identify and segment objects of interest based on implicit text queries. As such, RS is a catalyst for embodied AI agents, enabling them to interpret high-level commands without requiring explicit step-by-step guidance. However, current RS approaches rely heavily on the visual perception capabilities of multimodal large language models (LLMs), leading to several major limitations. First, they struggle with queries that require multiple steps of reasoning or those that involve complex spatial/temporal relationships. Second, they necessitate LLM fine-tuning, which may require frequent updates to maintain compatibility with contemporary LLMs and may increase risks of catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. Finally, being primarily designed for static images or offline video processing, they scale poorly to online video data. To address these limitations, we propose an agent framework that disentangles perception and reasoning for online video RS without LLM fine-tuning. Our innovation is the introduction of a just-in-time digital twin concept, where -- given an implicit query -- a LLM plans the construction of a low-level scene representation from high-level video using specialist vision models. We refer to this approach to creating a digital twin as "just-in-time" because the LLM planner will anticipate the need for specific information and only request this limited subset instead of always evaluating every specialist model. The LLM then performs reasoning on this digital twin representation to identify target objects. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new comprehensive video reasoning segmentation benchmark comprising 200 videos with 895 implicit text queries. The benchmark spans three reasoning categories (semantic, spatial, and temporal) with three different reasoning chain complexity.

Operating Room Workflow Analysis via Reasoning Segmentation over Digital Twins

Analyzing operating room (OR) workflows to derive quantitative insights into OR efficiency is important for hospitals to maximize patient care and financial sustainability. Prior work on OR-level workflow analysis has relied on end-to-end deep neural networks. While these approaches work well in constrained settings, they are limited to the conditions specified at development time and do not offer the flexibility necessary to accommodate the OR workflow analysis needs of various OR scenarios (e.g., large academic center vs. rural provider) without data collection, annotation, and retraining. Reasoning segmentation (RS) based on foundation models offers this flexibility by enabling automated analysis of OR workflows from OR video feeds given only an implicit text query related to the objects of interest. Due to the reliance on large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, current RS approaches struggle with reasoning about semantic/spatial relationships and show limited generalization to OR video due to variations in visual characteristics and domain-specific terminology. To address these limitations, we first propose a novel digital twin (DT) representation that preserves both semantic and spatial relationships between the various OR components. Then, building on this foundation, we propose ORDiRS (Operating Room Digital twin representation for Reasoning Segmentation), an LLM-tuning-free RS framework that reformulates RS into a "reason-retrieval-synthesize" paradigm. Finally, we present ORDiRS-Agent, an LLM-based agent that decomposes OR workflow analysis queries into manageable RS sub-queries and generates responses by combining detailed textual explanations with supporting visual evidence from RS. Experimental results on both an in-house and a public OR dataset demonstrate that our ORDiRS achieves a cIoU improvement of 6.12%-9.74% compared to the existing state-of-the-arts.

Ultralow complexity long short-term memory network for fiber nonlinearity mitigation in coherent optical communication systems

Fiber Kerr nonlinearity is a fundamental limitation to the achievable capacity of long-distance optical fiber communication. Digital back-propagation (DBP) is a primary methodology to mitigate both linear and nonlinear impairments by solving the inverse-propagating nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE), which requires detailed link information. Recently, the paradigms based on neural network (NN) were proposed to mitigate nonlinear transmission impairments in optical communication systems. However, almost all neural network-based equalization schemes yield high computation complexity, which prevents the practical implementation in commercial transmission systems. In this paper, we propose a center-oriented long short-term memory network (Co-LSTM) incorporating a simplified mode with a recycling mechanism in the equalization operation, which can mitigate fiber nonlinearity in coherent optical communication systems with ultralow complexity. To validate the proposed methodology, we carry out an experiment of ten-channel wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission with 64 Gbaud polarization-division-multiplexed 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signals. Co-LSTM and DBP achieve a comparable performance of nonlinear mitigation. However, the complexity of Co-LSTM with a simplified mode is almost independent of the transmission distance, which is much lower than that of the DBP. The proposed Co-LSTM methodology presents an attractive approach for low complexity nonlinearity mitigation with neural networks.