# LVLMs as inspectors: an agentic framework for category-level structural defect annotation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00603 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00603/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 5 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [GPTs Are Multilingual Annotators for Sequence Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05512/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated structural defect annotation is essential for ensuring infrastructure safety while minimizing the high costs and inefficiencies of manual labeling. A novel agentic annotation framework, Agent-based Defect Pattern Tagger (ADPT), is introduced that integrates Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with a semantic pattern matching module and an iterative self-questioning refinement mechanism. By leveraging optimized domain-specific prompting and a recursive verification process, ADPT transforms raw visual data into high-quality, semantically labeled defect datasets without any manual supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that ADPT achieves up to 98% accuracy in distinguishing defective from non-defective images, and 85%-98% annotation accuracy across four defect categories under class-balanced settings, with 80%-92% accuracy on class-imbalanced datasets. The framework offers a scalable and cost-effective solution for high-fidelity dataset construction, providing strong support for downstream tasks such as transfer learning and domain adaptation in structural damage assessment.