English

Conversational Image Segmentation: Grounding Abstract Concepts with Scalable Supervision

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-02-16 v1

Abstract

Conversational image segmentation grounds abstract, intent-driven concepts into pixel-accurate masks. Prior work on referring image grounding focuses on categorical and spatial queries (e.g., "left-most apple") and overlooks functional and physical reasoning (e.g., "where can I safely store the knife?"). We address this gap and introduce Conversational Image Segmentation (CIS) and ConverSeg, a benchmark spanning entities, spatial relations, intent, affordances, functions, safety, and physical reasoning. We also present ConverSeg-Net, which fuses strong segmentation priors with language understanding, and an AI-powered data engine that generates prompt-mask pairs without human supervision. We show that current language-guided segmentation models are inadequate for CIS, while ConverSeg-Net trained on our data engine achieves significant gains on ConverSeg and maintains strong performance on existing language-guided segmentation benchmarks. Project webpage: https://glab-caltech.github.io/converseg/

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.13195,
  title  = {Conversational Image Segmentation: Grounding Abstract Concepts with Scalable Supervision},
  author = {Aadarsh Sahoo and Georgia Gkioxari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.13195},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Project webpage: https://glab-caltech.github.io/converseg/

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:35:45.681Z