DiffImaginE: Imagine to Verify Entity Types with Diffusio

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 4 Aug 2026] DiffImaginE: Imagine to Verify Entity Types with Diffusio Feng Zhang, Feiyu Han, Rongxin Yang, Yang Liu, Yancheng Chen, Rui Wang, Yingguang Yang, Tian Xueyun, Chongyang Zhang, Hao Zheng, Xu Kefu, Congjing Ran, Fuhai Chen, Bin Chong Multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) determines whether each candidate span and entity-type hypothesis is supported by joint textual and visual evidence. Existing imagine-and-compare verifiers map each (span, type) pair to one predicted visual feature, compressing diverse visual realisations into a single prototype and providing a compatibility score without explicit probabilistic semantics. We introduce DiffImaginE, which formulates MNER type verification as conditional latent diffusion inference. Given span-localised visual evidence, a type-conditioned denoiser predicts noise injected into its standardised latent. The resulting denoising error provides an ELBO-consistent surrogate for type-conditional negative log-likelihood, allowing competing type hypotheses to be ranked by how well they explain the observation. DiffImaginE retains a standard multimodal encoder stack and replaces the deterministic verifier with a classifier-free-guided diffusion scorer trained using Min-SNR weighting. We directly supervise per-type diffusion scores as classification logits, learn aggregation across noise levels, and use antithetic sampling to reduce Monte Carlo comparison variance. Our analysis shows that classifier-free guidance sharpens the induced type posterior and characterises when antithetic pairing reduces variance at equal denoiser cost. Experiments on Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017 show consistent gains over a matched deterministic ImaginE control under the same encoder, auxiliary objectives, and evaluation protocol, supported by ablations and paired significance tests. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2608.03025 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2608.03025v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.03025 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Feiyu Han [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 02:13:45 UTC (244 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)