{"ID":2887433,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01921","arxiv_id":"2508.01921","title":"InspectVLM: Unified in Theory, Unreliable in Practice","abstract":"Unified vision-language models (VLMs) promise to streamline computer vision pipelines by reframing multiple visual tasks such as classification, detection, and keypoint localization within a single language-driven interface. This architecture is particularly appealing in industrial inspection, where managing disjoint task-specific models introduces complexity, inefficiency, and maintenance overhead. In this paper, we critically evaluate the viability of this unified paradigm using InspectVLM, a Florence-2-based VLM trained on InspectMM, our new large-scale multimodal, multitask inspection dataset. While InspectVLM performs competitively on image-level classification and structured keypoint tasks, we find that it fails to match traditional ResNet-based models in core inspection metrics. Notably, the model exhibits brittle behavior under low prompt variability, produces degenerate outputs for fine-grained object detection, and frequently defaults to memorized language responses regardless of visual input. Our findings suggest that while language-driven unification offers conceptual elegance, current VLMs lack the visual grounding and robustness necessary for deployment in precision critical industrial inspections.","short_abstract":"Unified vision-language models (VLMs) promise to streamline computer vision pipelines by reframing multiple visual tasks such as classification, detection, and keypoint localization within a single language-driven interface. This architecture is particularly appealing in industrial inspection, where managing disjoint t...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01921","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01921v1","authors":"[\"Conor Wallace\",\"Isaac Corley\",\"Jonathan Lwowski\"]","published":"2025-08-03T21:09:35Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[\"Language Model\",\"Generative Adversarial Network\"]","has_code":false}