The paper introduces a controlled benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on key‑value pair extraction from documents with varying levels of OCR noise. It tests 136 configurations across five instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs, three datasets, and four text‑quality conditions, using deterministic decoding to generate 17,688 document‑level inferences. The study finds that clean‑text performance does not reliably predict real‑world robustness, model rankings can reverse under noisy conditions, and few‑shot demonstrations do not always improve accuracy, highlighting reliability risks in OCR‑to‑LLM pipelines.
By Zahra Anvari
The paper evaluates open-source OCR, LLM, and VLM systems on a high‑risk public sector task: extracting structured data from student application documents. Results show that VLMs generally outperform OCR+LLM pipelines, yet only 4 of 35 configurations achieve F1 scores above 0.5, with most combinations scoring below 0.25. Model size and input quality, especially preserving OCR structure, are critical factors influencing performance.
By Elias Schubert, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
arXiv:2605. 16409v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optical character recognition (OCR) and multilingual scene-text understanding remain challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in real-world images containing small or degraded text, cluttered layouts, occlusion, handwriting, and complex typography.
By Qinwu Xu, Yifan Jiang, Haoyu Ren
arXiv:2608.20868v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Document processing pipelines traditionally cascade optical character recognition (OCR) engines with downstream models for structured information ext...
By A. Said Gurbuz (IBM Research Zurich, ETH Zurich), Ahmed Nassar (IBM Research Zurich), Christoph Auer (IBM Research Zurich), Maksym Lysak (IBM Research Zurich), Lucas Morin (IBM Research Zurich), Matteo Omenetti (IBM Research Zurich), Tim Strohmeyer (IBM Research Zurich), Panagiotis Vagenas (IBM Research Zurich), Nikolaos Livathinos (IBM Research Zurich), Michele Dolfi (IBM Research Zurich), Peter Staar (IBM Research Zurich)
arXiv:2607. 16203v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document parsing is a foundational step for document understanding tasks such as visual question answering and key information extraction, as it transforms unstructured scanned images into structured representations by extracting textual, visual, and layout information.
By Zihan Xu, Puzhen Wu, Lawrence Chun Man Lau, Wei Liu, Sirui Li, Yifan Peng, Yihao Ding
We present HunyuanOCR-1. 5, a lightweight end-to-end OCR-specialized vision-language model.
HunyuanOCR-1.5 is a lightweight, end‑to‑end OCR‑specialized vision‑language model that unifies document parsing, text spotting, information extraction, text‑image translation, and multi‑image document understanding. It builds on the HunyuanOCR‑1.0 architecture, improving efficiency with DFlash‑based OCR decoding for faster inference (6.37× Transformer speedup, 2.14× under vLLM) and enhancing capability through an Agentic Data Flow system that autonomously constructs high‑quality training data for long‑tail OCR tasks. The model achieves top‑tier performance on OmniDocBench v1.6 and sets new milestones in ancient‑script OCR, chart/table parsing, multilingual parsing, and hallucination evaluation, while remaining lightweight for deployment.
By Gengluo Li, Xingyu Wan, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Hao Feng, Yongkun Du, Binghong Wu, Zheng Ruan, Zhiqiong Lu, Liang Wu, Pengyuan Lyu, Huawen Shen, Zibin Lin, Shijing Hu, Jieneng Yang, Hongbing Wen, Guanghua Yu, Hong Liu, Bochao Wang, Can Ma, Han Hu, Chengquan Zhang, Yu Zhou
arXiv:2607. 03836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite remarkable progress in machine translation, Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle on historical manuscripts, a domain that stresses core Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities: low-resource transliteration, archaic vocabulary, and noisy input signals.
By Nguyen Kim Hai Bui, Md. Easin Arafat, Tam\'as G\'abor Orosz, Mufti Mahmud
arXiv:2609.37195v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems have become an indispensable tool for the digitization of historical documents. Not only do they cut down ti...
By Eric Ayllon, Abel Gandia, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza
The paper introduces Synth-JDoc, a synthetic Japanese document image dataset created by rendering text with HTML and CSS to produce multi‑column layouts that include both vertical and horizontal writing styles. Images generated by text‑to‑image models are embedded to enhance visual realism, and noise and degradation filters are applied to improve robustness. Experiments show that fine‑tuning Large Vision Language Models on Synth‑JDoc yields superior performance on reading vertically written Japanese text compared to prior synthetic datasets.
By Keito Sasagawa, Shuhei Kurita, Daisuke Kawahara
arXiv:2607. 03650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting textual information from scanned medical documents, such as external laboratory reports and manually filled forms, has been a major challenge in modern electronic health records (EHRs).
By Enshuo Hsu, Jin Zhou, Kirk Roberts
MUDIDI is a two-stage framework designed to digitize multilingual dictionaries that are currently only available as scanned images. The first stage assesses character recognition and markup preservation, while the second stage segments dictionary entries and maps them into the SIL Multi-Dictionary Formatter schema. The authors also release a dataset of 30 annotated dictionaries and benchmark OCR, LLM, and VLM systems, finding that LLMs generally outperform others and that providing additional context improves digitization quality.
By David Setiawan, Temuulen Khishigsuren, Milind Agarwal, Pagnarith Pit, Aso Mahmudi, Ekaterina Vylomova