Papers › ThinkVideo: High-Quality Reasoning Video Segmentation with Chain of Thoughts
ThinkVideo: High-Quality Reasoning Video Segmentation with Chain of Thoughts
Shiu-hong Kao, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang
Reasoning Video Object Segmentation is a challenging task, which generates a mask sequence from an input video and an implicit, complex text query. Existing works probe into the problem by finetuning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) for segmentation-based output, while still falling short in difficult cases on videos given temporally-sensitive queries, primarily due to the failure to integrate temporal and spatial information. In this paper, we propose ThinkVideo, a novel framework which leverages the zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) capability of MLLM to address these challenges. Specifically, ThinkVideo utilizes the CoT prompts to extract object selectivities associated with particular keyframes, then bridging the reasoning image segmentation model and SAM2 video processor to output mask sequences. The ThinkVideo framework is training-free and compatible with closed-source MLLMs, which can be applied to Reasoning Video Instance Segmentation. We further extend the framework for online video streams, where the CoT is used to update the object of interest when a better target starts to emerge and becomes visible. We conduct extensive experiments on video object segmentation with explicit and implicit queries. The results show that ThinkVideo significantly outperforms previous works in both cases, qualitatively and quantitatively.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections