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arXiv · 2608.17723

Vision-Language Models for Analog Gauge Reading: An Empirical Study of Specialization, Transfer and Reliability

Abdul Mueez·Aaditya Baranwal·Junior Chaj-Mejia·Guneet Bhatia·Jason T. Voelker·Shruti Vyas
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Abstract

Analog gauges remain common in industrial environments where manual inspection is costly or hazardous. The engineering application addressed here is direct numerical reading of single-target analog-gauge images, while the artificial-intelligence contribution is a systematic evaluation of specialization, transfer, robustness and reliability for a general-purpose vision-language model (VLM) without an explicit pointer-segmentation and geometric-reading pipeline. The Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct model is evaluated using zero-shot prompting, in-context learning (ICL) and parameter-efficient fine-tuning with Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) on a public synthetic dataset, a video-derived Pressure Gauge dataset and a proprietary industrial dataset. All fine-tuning experiments use a fixed 20-epoch protocol with the final epoch used for analysis; separate models with and without supplied gauge ranges remove prompt-setting confounds. The primary metric is range-normalized mean percentage error (MPE). The best fine-tuned MPE values are 2.39% on the synthetic dataset, with a 95% bootstrap confidence interval (CI) of 1.43-3.90%; 2.61% on the Pressure Gauge dataset, with a CI of 1.66-3.80%; and 4.43% on the proprietary industrial dataset, with a CI of 2.31-7.14%. Leave-one-dataset-out experiments reveal substantial transfer degradation on held-out synthetic and proprietary data, while robustness tests identify Gaussian blur as the strongest tested corruption. Reliability analysis shows that high-confidence errors remain possible, motivating abstention and independent validation in safety-critical use. These results support QLoRA-specialized VLMs for direct single-gauge reading but not yet a deployment-ready plant-monitoring pipeline.

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Abdul Mueez, Aaditya Baranwal, Junior Chaj-Mejia, Guneet Bhatia, Jason T. Voelker, Shruti Vyas. 2026-08-18. Vision-Language Models for Analog Gauge Reading: An Empirical Study of Specialization, Transfer and Reliability. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17723

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