UOUO: Uncontextualized Uncommon Objects for Measuring Knowledge Horizons of Vision Language Models

Smaller-scale Vision-Langauge Models (VLMs) often claim to perform on par with larger models in general-domain visual grounding and question-answering benchmarks while offering advantages in computational efficiency and storage. However, their ability to handle rare objects, which fall into the long tail of data distributions, is less understood. To rigorously evaluate this aspect, we introduce the "Uncontextualized Uncommon Objects" (UOUO) benchmark. This benchmark focuses on systematically testing VLMs with both large and small parameter counts on rare and specialized objects. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that while smaller VLMs maintain competitive performance on common datasets, they significantly underperform on tasks involving uncommon objects. We also propose an advanced, scalable pipeline for data collection and cleaning, ensuring the UOUO benchmark provides high-quality, challenging instances. These findings highlight the need to consider long-tail distributions when assessing the true capabilities of VLMs.

WeldMon: A Cost-effective Ultrasonic Welding Machine Condition Monitoring System

Ultrasonic welding machines play a critical role in the lithium battery industry, facilitating the bonding of batteries with conductors. Ensuring high-quality welding is vital, making tool condition monitoring systems essential for early-stage quality control. However, existing monitoring methods face challenges in cost, downtime, and adaptability. In this paper, we present WeldMon, an affordable ultrasonic welding machine condition monitoring system that utilizes a custom data acquisition system and a data analysis pipeline designed for real-time analysis. Our classification algorithm combines auto-generated features and hand-crafted features, achieving superior cross-validation accuracy (95.8% on average over all testing tasks) compared to the state-of-the-art method (92.5%) in condition classification tasks. Our data augmentation approach alleviates the concept drift problem, enhancing tool condition classification accuracy by 8.3%. All algorithms run locally, requiring only 385 milliseconds to process data for each welding cycle. We deploy WeldMon and a commercial system on an actual ultrasonic welding machine, performing a comprehensive comparison. Our findings highlight the potential for developing cost-effective, high-performance, and reliable tool condition monitoring systems.