LLMSeg: Training-Free Text-Prompted Image Segmentation with B-Splines

Abdullah Hamdi

Promptable segmentation models such as SAM 3 achieve remarkable open-vocabulary performance but require dedicated architectures, large-scale annotation engines, and task-specific training. We ask a different question: can a general-purpose multimodal large language model (MLLM) segment images directly, without an added segmentation head, mask decoder, or training? We present LLMSeg, a training-free pipeline that turns a vision-capable LLM into a text-prompted image segmenter. LLMSeg decomposes segmentation into three LLM-driven stages. First, detect localizes all instances matching a free-form text query and describes their coarse morphology. Next, segment traces each instance using closed periodic B-splines confined to its detected box. These splines define an outer boundary and optional hole loops. Finally, refine iteratively proposes focus boxes around residual errors and retraces confined splines. The process ends when the mask stabilizes or the pass budget is exhausted. The output is a binary mask with inspectable intermediate geometry. We evaluate LLMSeg across ten referring and reasoning segmentation splits (ReasonSeg and RefCOCO/+/g). We also evaluate open-vocabulary…