Think Before You Link: Rarity, Reasoning, and Retrieval in Multilingual Entity Linking
Training-free reasoning-plus-retrieval framework lifts multilingual multimodal entity linking accuracy by 6.9% overall and up to 23.3% on rare entities.
The paper broadens rarity measurement in multimodal entity linking using knowledge-graph structural metrics beyond popularity-based pageview metrics, identifying many rare entities that popularity metrics miss. Across these rare-entity slices, state-of-the-art accuracy drops by 15.4-39.9%, exposing distinct failure modes under different rarity definitions. The proposed training-free framework iteratively searches and reasons over Wikipedia with a reasoning-capable vision-language model; experiments show reasoning and retrieval are complementary. On the MERLIN benchmark covering Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Tamil, and Vietnamese, the system improves overall accuracy by 6.9% and up to 23.3% on rare entities, with MERLIN-Rare test slices released.
- Knowledge-graph structural metrics uncover rare entities missed by popularity metrics
- SOTA accuracy drops 15.4-39.9% on rare-entity slices
- Reasoning alone fails on rare entities; retrieval without reasoning hurts overall accuracy
- Combined approach improves MERLIN accuracy by 6.9% overall and up to 23.3% on rare entities
- MERLIN-Rare rare-entity test slices released
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Multimodal entity linking grounds entity mentions in text and images to knowledge-base entries. These systems degrade on rare entities, but prior work measures rarity primarily through popularity-based metrics such as pageviews. We broaden this view using knowledge-graph structural metrics that capture how well an entity is documented and connected. These metrics identify many rare entities that popularity metrics miss. Across the resulting rare-entity slices, state-of-the-art accuracy drops by 15.4-39.9%, showing that different rarity definitions expose different failure modes. To address these failures, we introduce a simple, training-free framework in which a reasoning-capable vision-language model iteratively searches and reasons over Wikipedia, gathering evidence dynamically. Controlled experiments show that reasoning and retrieval are complementary. Reasoning alone does not significantly improve accuracy on rare entities. Retrieval without reasoning improves rare-entity accuracy but can hurt overall accuracy. Their combination performs best. On MERLIN, a multilingual multimodal entity linking benchmark over five languages (Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Tamil, Vietnamese), our best system improves over the state of the art by 6.9% overall and by up to 23.3% on rare-entity slices. We release MERLIN-Rare, rare-entity test slices for targeted evaluation, with our framework.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.10745