Empowering intelligent quality control with large models: A comprehensive survey of methods, challenges, and perspectives
Xinyu PAN , Di WANG , Fugee TSUNG
Eng. Manag ›› 2026, Vol. 13 ›› Issue (1) : 42 -64.
Quality control (QC) serves as a cornerstone of modern manufacturing, exerting a decisive influence on production efficiency, product reliability and customer satisfaction. However, traditional QC systems, which largely rely on rule-based frameworks and narrowly defined statistical methods, face increasing limitations in handling the scale, diversity and complexity of contemporary industrial data. This limitation provides a strong motivation to explore the potential of large models (LMs) for advancing QC. Distinguished by their powerful capabilities in knowledge integration, contextual understanding and adaptive reasoning, LMs offer transformative opportunities to modernize QC. This review begins by analyzing why LMs are particularly well positioned to enhance QC, focusing on three crucial dimensions: input alignment, which enables seamless integration of heterogeneous data sources; task adaptability, which supports associative learning across multiple QC tasks and allows knowledge transfer; and augmented intelligence, which supports human experts in complex decision-making. Recent advances in industrial applications are summarized, with particular attention to methodological innovations, deployment practices and integration pathways into manufacturing workflows. To systematically structure the current landscape, the key challenges are categorized into three interrelated dimensions, i.e., data, model and evaluation, which correspond to the core requirements for model training, practical implementation and sustainable adaptability in real-world scenarios. Building on this foundation, the review further outlines future research directions, highlighting secure data collaboration, system-level integration and continual learning under dynamic environments as critical priorities for the next stage of development. Collectively, these insights underscore the promise of LMs in reshaping QC into an intelligent, resilient and future-ready paradigm.
quality control / large models / foundation models / industrial artificial intelligence survey / manufacturing intelligence
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Higher Education Press
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