@inproceedings{liu-etal-2026-memory,
    title = "Memory-Guided Hard Data Augmentation for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition",
    author = "Liu, Xinyu  and
      fu, Kai  and
      Shi, Yinghan  and
      Chu, Quanyou  and
      Du, Ming  and
      Wang, Hongya  and
      Meng, Xiaojun  and
      Wei, Jiansheng  and
      Xiao, Yanghua  and
      Xu, Bo",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1075/",
    pages = "21376--21391",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Multimodal Named Entity Recognition relies on visual context to resolve textual ambiguities. To mitigate data scarcity, Data Augmentation (DA) has become a standard practice; however, existing methods predominantly adopt a one-size-fits-all and random perturbation paradigm, ignoring the internal state of the target model. In this paper, we first conduct a quantitative analysis, revealing that a significant portion of errors (over 30{\%}) are model-specific, stemming from the unique biases of different architectures. To address this, we propose Memory-Guided Hard Data Augmentation, a framework designed to systematically repair these specific defects. First, we employ K-fold cross-validation to identify model-specific Hard Data. Second, we construct a Memory Tree and utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) with a clustering mechanism to induce macro-level error patterns from micro-level failures. This facilitates a paradigm shift from stateless instance-driven augmentation to a logical pattern-driven approach. Finally, we introduce an iterative augmentation mechanism that triggers recursive generation for stubborn instances that fail initial quality filters. Extensive experiments on Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017 benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently yields significant performance gains across various MNER backbones."
}