SAM-Veteran: An MLLM-Based Human-like SAM Agent for Reasoning Segmentation

Significant progress has been made in reasoning segmentation by combining multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) with the Segment Anything Model (SAM): the former excel in reasoning and vision–language alignment, while the latter offers powerful pixel-level understanding. However, current paradigms fall short in exploiting SAM’s strengths, especially the ability to support iterative mask refinement by interactive segmentation, a process that human users can naturally perform. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAM-Veteran, an experienced mask-aware SAM agent capable of emulating human interaction with SAM via a reasoning-driven segmentation workflow that integrates (i) generating bounding boxes given image–query pairs for SAM input, (ii) proposing refinement points based on SAM-generated masks, and (iii) adaptively terminating the process. Aiming for this goal, we propose a multi-task reinforcement learning framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which enhances the MLLM’s abilities in textual grounding and mask comprehension. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic sampling strategy tailored for generating both boxes and points to stabilize training. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets show that SAM-Veteran achieves human-like interaction with SAM and establishes new state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks.