Named entity recognition (NER) is a pivotal task reliant on textual data, often impeding the disambiguation of entities due to the absence of context. To tackle this challenge, conventional methods often incorporate images crawled from the internet as auxiliary information. However, the images often lack sufficient entities or would introduce noise. Even with high-quality images, it is still challenging to efficiently use images as auxiliaries (i.e., fine-grained alignment with texts). We introduce a novel method named InstructNER to address these issues. Leveraging the rich real-world knowledge and image synthesis capabilities of a large pre-trained stable diffusion (SD) model, InstructNER transforms the text-only NER into a multimodal NER (MNER) task. A selection process automatically identifies the best synthetic image by comparing fine-grained similarities with internet-crawled images through a visual bag-of-words strategy. Note, during the image synthesis, a cross-attention matrix between synthetic images and raw text emerges, which inspires a soft attention guidance alignment (AGA) mechanism. AGA optimizes the MNER task and concurrently facilitates instructive alignment in MNER. Empirical experiments on prominent MNER datasets show that our method surpasses all text-only baselines, improving F1-score by 1.4% to 2.3%. Remarkably, even when compared to fully multimodal baselines, our approach maintains competitive. Furthermore, we open-source a comprehensive synthetic image dataset and the code to supplement existing raw dataset. The code and datasets are available in https://github.com/Heyest/InstructNER.

Our paper aims to automate the generation of medical reports from chest X-ray image inputs, a critical yet time-consuming task for radiologists. Existing medical report generation efforts emphasize producing human-readable reports, yet the generated text may not be well aligned to the clinical facts. Our generated medical reports, on the other hand, are fluent and, more importantly, clinically accurate. This is achieved by our fully differentiable and end-to-end paradigm that contains three complementary modules: taking the chest X-ray images and clinical history document of patients as inputs, our classification module produces an internal checklist of disease-related topics, referred to as enriched disease embedding; the embedding representation is then passed to our transformer-based generator, to produce the medical report; meanwhile, our generator also creates a weighted embedding representation, which is fed to our interpreter to ensure consistency with respect to disease-related topics. Empirical evaluations demonstrate very promising results achieved by our approach on commonly-used metrics concerning language fluency and clinical accuracy. Moreover, noticeable performance gains are consistently observed when additional input information is available, such as the clinical document and extra scans from different views.