# SCANNER: Knowledge-Enhanced Approach for Robust Multi-modal Named Entity Recognition of Unseen Entities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01914 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01914/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01057/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09449/) (2018)
- [A Unified Generative Framework for Various NER Subtasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01223/) (2021)
- [Unified Named Entity Recognition as Word-Word Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10070/) (2021)
- [Semi-supervised sequence tagging with bidirectional language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00108/) (2017)
- [Improving Named Entity Recognition by External Context Retrieving and Cooperative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03654/) (2021)
- [CrossWeigh: Training Named Entity Tagger from Imperfect Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01441/) (2019)
- [Named Entity and Relation Extraction with Multi-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01612/) (2022)
- [MNER-QG: An End-to-End MRC framework for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Query Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14739/) (2022)
- [Learning Implicit Entity-object Relations by Bidirectional Generative Alignment for Multimodal NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02570/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Beyond Unimodal Shortcuts: MLLMs as Cross-Modal Reasoners for Grounded Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04486/) (2026)
- [Multi-Grained Query-Guided Set Prediction Network for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21033/) (2024)
- [ReFineG: Synergizing Small Supervised Models and LLMs for Low-Resource Grounded Multimodal NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10975/) (2025)
- [SAKE: Self-aware Knowledge Exploitation-Exploration for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20146/) (2026)
- [KoGNER: A Novel Framework for Knowledge Graph Distillation on Biomedical Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15737/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in named entity recognition (NER) have pushed the boundary of the task to incorporate visual signals, leading to many variants, including multi-modal NER (MNER) or grounded MNER (GMNER). A key challenge to these tasks is that the model should be able to generalize to the entities unseen during the training, and should be able to handle the training samples with noisy annotations. To address this obstacle, we propose SCANNER (Span CANdidate detection and recognition for NER), a model capable of effectively handling all three NER variants. SCANNER is a two-stage structure; we extract entity candidates in the first stage and use it as a query to get knowledge, effectively pulling knowledge from various sources. We can boost our performance by utilizing this entity-centric extracted knowledge to address unseen entities. Furthermore, to tackle the challenges arising from noisy annotations in NER datasets, we introduce a novel self-distillation method, enhancing the robustness and accuracy of our model in processing training data with inherent uncertainties. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance on the NER benchmark and surpasses existing methods on both MNER and GMNER benchmarks. Further analysis shows that the proposed distillation and knowledge utilization methods improve the performance of our model on various benchmarks.