CamoQuery: Language-Guided Reasoning Camouflaged Object Segmentation

Tianxin Han, Qing Dong, Xingwei Wang, Jie Jia, Gang Wu, Bowen Yang, Fu Zhang


Abstract
Although camouflaged object segmentation has advanced rapidly in recent years, existing methods are still confined to visual mask prediction under fixed task assumptions. They cannot interactively respond to user requests, nor can they proactively understand and reason about the user’s intent. Our work tackles this issue by proposing a novel task, Language-Guided Reasoning Camouflaged Object Segmentation (LRCOS). Given a camouflaged image and an implicit query text instruction that requires reasoning, LRCOS aims to output intent-consistent segmentation mask. To establish a benchmark for this task, we build CamoQuery, comprising 12,437 image–mask samples and 25971 implicit query text instructions. To better reflect real-world camouflaged scenarios, we additionally collect MCD, a multi-instance camouflage dataset where multiple camouflaged targets co-exist within the same scene, increasing the need for reasoning. Building on CamoQuery, we further propose COSA, a vision–language segmentation assistant that segments the intended camouflaged object from implicit queries and produces a reasoning explanation. Experiments on CamoQuery demonstrate that COSA has strong reasoning segmentation capability in camouflaged scenes and exhibits zero-shot capability.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1050
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22924–22941
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1050/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianxin Han, Qing Dong, Xingwei Wang, Jie Jia, Gang Wu, Bowen Yang, and Fu Zhang. 2026. CamoQuery: Language-Guided Reasoning Camouflaged Object Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 22924–22941, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CamoQuery: Language-Guided Reasoning Camouflaged Object Segmentation (Han et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1050.pdf
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