A unified vision-language model for cross-product defect detection in glove manufacturing

Yusen Zhao, Liang Tian and Yonggang Wang

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 2, 1-13

Abstract: Automated anomaly detection is vital to industrial quality control, yet conventional deep learning detectors often struggle with scalability. These models, typically following a rigid “one-model-per-task” paradigm, require separate systems for each product line, increasing operational complexity and cost in diverse manufacturing environments. To address this limitation, we propose a unified defect detection framework based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Our approach utilizes a two-stage fine-tuning strategy: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to impart domain-specific knowledge, followed by a novel Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) process that refines visual reasoning. This RFT stage is guided by a multi-faceted verifiable reward function designed to optimize localization accuracy, classification correctness, and output structure. On a challenging real-world glove manufacturing dataset, our RFT-enhanced MLLM achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.63, which is comparable to a highly specialized YOLO baseline (0.62). More importantly, a single, unified MLLM trained on a mixed-product dataset maintains competitive performance (mAP 0.61), demonstrating its ability to dynamically handle different products and defect types via natural language prompts. This study validates the feasibility of using a single, flexible MLLM to replace multiple rigid models in complex industrial inspection, offering a scalable and cost-effective paradigm for future intelligent quality control systems. The open-source code will be released at https://github.com/GloamXun/Glove-MLLM.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0339867

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0339867

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