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Do multimodal large language models understand welding?

delete2025-05-15
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PRE
AI
G
Grigorii Khvatskii
Y
Yong Suk Lee *
C
Corey Angst
R
Robert G. Landers
N
Nitesh V. Chawla *
DOI:10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103121delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
This paper examines the performance of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) in skilled production work, with a focus on welding. Using a novel data set of real-world and online weld images, annotated by a domain expert, we evaluate the performance of two state-of-the-art MLLMs in assessing weld acceptability across three contexts: RV & Marine, Aeronautical, and Farming. While both models perform better on online images, likely due to prior exposure or memorization, they also perform relatively well on unseen, real-world weld images. Additionally, we introduce WeldPrompt, a prompting strategy that combines Chain-of-Thought generation with in-context learning to mitigate hallucinations and improve reasoning. WeldPrompt improves model recall in certain contexts but exhibits inconsistent performance across others. These results underscore the limitations and potentials of MLLMs in high-stakes technical domains and highlight the importance of fine-tuning, domain-specific data, and more sophisticated prompting strategies to improve model reliability. The study opens avenues for further research into multimodal learning in industry applications.
Keywords:
AI in manufacturing
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs)
Welding
Skilled production work
Real-world image classification
WeldPrompt

Journal

Information Fusion cover
Information Fusion
IF:
15.5
Papers:
4.1K
Citations:
2.7W

Organization

U
Univ Notre Dame
Scholars:
576
Papers: 324
Citations: 106