LLMs as Bridges: Reformulating Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) Module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks.

Experimental Investigation on the Friction-induced Vibration with Periodic Characteristics in a Running-in Process under Lubrication

This paper investigated the friction-induced vibration (FIV) behavior under the running-in process with oil lubrication. The FIV signal with periodic characteristics under lubrication was identified with the help of the squeal signal induced in an oil-free wear experiment and then extracted by the harmonic wavelet packet transform (HWPT). The variation of the FIV signal from running-in wear stage to steady wear stage was studied by its root mean square (RMS) values. The result indicates that the time-frequency characteristics of the FIV signals evolve with the wear process and can reflect the wear stages of the friction pairs. The RMS evolvement of the FIV signal is in the same trend to the composite surface roughness and demonstrates that the friction pair goes through the running-in wear stage and the steady wear stage. Therefore, the FIV signal with periodic characteristics can describe the evolvement of the running-in process and distinguish the running-in wear stage and the stable wear stage of the friction pair.