Recently, multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) has emerged as a vital research area within named entity recognition. However, current MNER datasets and methods are predominantly based on text and a single accompanying image, leaving a significant research gap in MNER scenarios involving multiple images. To address the critical research gap and enhance the scope of MNER for real-world applications, we propose a novel human-annotated MNER dataset with multiple images called MNER-MI. Additionally, we construct a dataset named MNER-MI-Plus, derived from MNER-MI, to ensure its generality and applicability. Based on these datasets, we establish a comprehensive set of strong and representative baselines and we further propose a simple temporal prompt model with multiple images to address the new challenges in multi-image scenarios. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate that considering multiple images provides a significant improvement over a single image and can offer substantial benefits for MNER. Furthermore, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on both MNER-MI and MNER-MI-Plus, demonstrating its effectiveness. The datasets and source code can be found at https://github.com/JinFish/MNER-MI.

Text is ubiquitous in our visual world, conveying crucial information, such as in documents, websites, and everyday photographs. In this work, we propose UReader, a first exploration of universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). By leveraging the shallow text recognition ability of the MLLM, we only finetuned 1.2% parameters and the training cost is much lower than previous work following domain-specific pretraining and finetuning paradigms. Concretely, UReader is jointly finetuned on a wide range of Visually-situated Language Understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. To enhance the visual text and semantic understanding, we further apply two auxiliary tasks with the same format, namely text reading and key points generation tasks. We design a shape-adaptive cropping module before the encoder-decoder architecture of MLLM to leverage the frozen low-resolution vision encoder for processing high-resolution images. Without downstream finetuning, our single model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks, across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. Codes and instruction-tuning datasets will be released.

Large-scale pre-trained foundation models have been an emerging paradigm for building artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which can be quickly adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. This paper presents mPLUG, a new vision-language foundation model for both cross-modal understanding and generation. Most existing pre-trained models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. To address both problems, mPLUG introduces an effective and efficient vision-language architecture with novel cross-modal skip-connections.mPLUG is pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. It achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. mPLUG also demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability on vision-language and video-language tasks. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/alibaba/AliceMind