Attention Maps Know When to Think: Training-Free Difficulty-Aware Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Segmentation

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become a standard reasoning strategy in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), showing strong performance in complex vision-language tasks such as reasoning segmentation. However, our analysis reveals that indiscriminate CoT usage can lead to degraded performance by inducing unnecessary reasoning, a phenomenon we term overthinking. In reasoning segmentation, overthinking often leads to misalignment between the query's intent and visual grounding. To address this, we propose Difficulty-Aware Chain-of-Thought (DA-CoT), a training-free adaptive framework that selectively triggers CoT based on the input's intrinsic difficulty. We find that the entropy of the model's attention maps reliably reflects task difficulty: low entropy indicates confident, localized grounding, while high entropy suggests uncertainty and potential benefit from CoT. DA-CoT uses this entropy signal to determine whether to apply CoT prompting. Additionally, we introduce a Bidirectional Rethinking mechanism that enables the model to automatically flip its reasoning decision when the initial output fails, enhancing robustness by recovering from failures induced by overthinking and underthinking. DA-CoT demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving state-of-the-art performance on the Reasoning Segmentation benchmarks while significantly improving inference efficiency.