Guideline-Consistent Segmentation via Multi-Agent Refinement

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Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, James Davis, Ashwani Rathee, Vanshika Vats
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Semantic segmentation in real-world applications often requires not only accurate masks but also strict adherence to textual labeling guidelines. These guidelines are typically complex and long, and both human and automated labeling often fail to follow them faithfully. Traditional approaches depend on expensive task-specific retraining that must be repeated as the guidelines evolve. Although recent open-vocabulary segmentation methods excel with simple prompts, they often fail when confronted with sets of paragraph-length guidelines that specify intricate segmentation rules. To address this, we introduce a multi-agent, training-free framework that coordinates general-purpose vision-language models within an iterative Worker-Supervisor refinement architecture. The Worker performs the segmentation, the Supervisor critiques it against the retrieved guidelines, and a lightweight reinforcement learning stop policy decides when to terminate the loop, ensuring guideline-consistent masks while balancing resource use. Evaluated on the Waymo and ReasonSeg datasets, our method notably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating strong generalization and instruction adherence.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Advanced Neural Network Applications Multimodal Machine Learning Applications Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN