{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/segagent-exploring-pixel-understanding","title":"SegAgent: Exploring Pixel Understanding Capabilities in MLLMs by Imitating Human Annotator Trajectories","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2025-03-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhu","Muzhi; Tian","Yuzhuo; Chen","Hao; Zhou","Chunluan; Guo","Qingpei; Liu","Yang; Yang","Ming; Shen","Chunhua"],"abstract":"While MLLMs have demonstrated adequate image understanding capabilities, they still struggle with pixel-level comprehension, limiting their practical applications. Current evaluation tasks like VQA and visual grounding remain too coarse to assess fine-grained pixel comprehension accurately. Though segmentation is foundational for pixel-level understanding, existing methods often require MLLMs to generate implicit tokens, decoded through external pixel decoders. This approach disrupts the MLLM's text output space, potentially compromising language capabilities and reducing flexibility and extensibility, while failing to reflect the model's intrinsic pixel-level understanding.\r\nThus, we introduce the Human-Like Mask Annotation Task (HLMAT), a new paradigm where MLLMs mimic human annotators using interactive segmentation tools. Modeling segmentation as a multi-step Markov Decision Process, HLMAT enables MLLMs to iteratively generate text-based click points, achieving high-quality masks without architectural changes or implicit tokens. Through this setup, we develop SegAgent, a model fine-tuned on human-like annotation trajectories, which achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and supports additional tasks like mask refinement and annotation filtering.\r\nHLMAT provides a protocol for assessing fine-grained pixel understanding in MLLMs and introduces a vision-centric, multi-step decision-making task that facilitates exploration of MLLMs' visual reasoning abilities. Our adaptations of policy improvement method StaR and PRM-guided tree search further enhance model robustness in complex segmentation tasks, laying a foundation for future advancements in fine-grained visual perception and multi-step decision-making for MLLMs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08625","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08625","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"segagent-exploring-pixel-understanding","repo_url":"https://github.com/aim-uofa/SegAgent","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"interactive-segmentation","task_name":"Interactive Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"referring-expression-segmentation","task_name":"Referring Expression Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"visual-grounding","task_name":"Visual Grounding"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"},{"task_slug":"visual-reasoning","task_name":"Visual Reasoning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/referring-expression-segmentation-on-refcoco-3","task":"Referring Expression Segmentation","dataset":"RefCOCO+ val","model":"SegAgent","rank_in_archive_order":10,"of":33,"metrics":{"Overall IoU":"72.49"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/referring-expression-segmentation-on-refcocog","task":"Referring Expression Segmentation","dataset":"RefCOCOg-val","model":"SegAgent","rank_in_archive_order":6,"of":23,"metrics":{"Overall IoU":"75.11"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/referring-expression-segmentation-on-refcoco","task":"Referring Expression Segmentation","dataset":"RefCoCo val","model":"SegAgent","rank_in_archive_order":12,"of":37,"metrics":{"Overall IoU":"79.7"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}