English

CORE-Seg: Reasoning-Driven Segmentation for Complex Lesions via Reinforcement Learning

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-09 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Medical image segmentation is undergoing a paradigm shift from conventional visual pattern matching to cognitive reasoning analysis. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in integrating linguistic and visual knowledge, significant gaps remain: existing general MLLMs possess broad common sense but lack the specialized visual reasoning required for complex lesions, whereas traditional segmentation models excel at pixel-level segmentation but lack logical interpretability. In this paper, we introduce ComLesion-14K, the first diverse Chain-of-Thought (CoT) benchmark for reasoning-driven complex lesion segmentation. To accomplish this task, we propose CORE-Seg, an end-to-end framework integrating reasoning with segmentation through a Semantic-Guided Prompt Adapter. We design a progressive training strategy from SFT to GRPO, equipped with an adaptive dual-granularity reward mechanism to mitigate reward sparsity. Our Method achieves state-of-the-art results with a mean Dice of 37.06\% (14.89\% higher than the second-best baseline), while reducing the failure rate to 18.42\%. Project Page: https://xyxl024.github.io/CORE-Seg.github.io/

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.05911,
  title  = {CORE-Seg: Reasoning-Driven Segmentation for Complex Lesions via Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Yuxin Xie and Yuming Chen and Yishan Yang and Yi Zhou and Tao Zhou and Zhen Zhao and Jiacheng Liu and Huazhu Fu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05911},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Under Review with Computational Visual Media

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:06:10.771Z