arXiv AI

Judge a Book by its Cover: Investigating Multi-Modal LLMs for Multi-Page Handwritten Document Transcription

arXiv:2502. 20295v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Handwriting text recognition (HTR) remains a challenging task.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

Multilingual OCR-Aware Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models

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 AI
Aug 20

OmniHandwritingOCR: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal LLMs in Handwritten OCR Scenarios

OmniHandwritingOCR is a diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and OCR systems on handwritten text and mathematical expression recognition. It comprises 77.57K labeled images across six subtasks and twelve subsets, including a difficulty‑stratified multi‑line formula corpus that tests robustness to increasing structural complexity. The benchmark reveals that current systems perform poorly on complex multi‑line formulas, exhibit variable rankings across languages and formula settings, and sometimes hallucinate corrections that are not visually supported.

By Zinuo Guo, Min Zhang, Bo Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

ExpertHTR: Unified Handwritten Text Recognition with Multi-Task Learning and Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

ExpertHTR is a unified vision‑language framework for handwritten text recognition that tackles the challenge of small, heterogeneous datasets by organizing structural annotations into a common Page‑Region‑Line representation. It defines four related training tasks—complete transcription, physical‑line coverage, text localization, and localized recognition—without extra manual labels. The model combines a jointly trained dense backbone with a sparse Mixture‑of‑Experts architecture, using Sparsegen routing and regularization to adaptively activate experts, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on the IAM benchmark and outperforming general‑purpose OCR systems on most datasets.

By Dang Hoai Nam, Nguyen Duy Hieu, Quang Huu Hieu, Vo Nguyen Le Duy
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Impact of Iterative Fine-Tuning on Transcription Accuracy in Complex Historical Sanskrit Manuscripts

The paper presents a local traditional OCR pipeline that can be iteratively fine‑tuned on both layout and appearance levels of complex historical Sanskrit manuscripts. By adapting to the specific manuscript distribution, the pipeline improves transcription accuracy across subsequent pages, reducing the need for costly human annotation. The authors apply the method to three manuscripts, release a dataset with detailed layout and Unicode annotations in PAGE‑XML format, and benchmark the results against leading multimodal large language models.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Impact of Iterative Fine-Tuning on Transcription Accuracy in Complex Historical Sanskrit Manuscripts

The paper presents a local traditional OCR pipeline that can be iteratively fine‑tuned on both layout and appearance levels of complex historical Sanskrit manuscripts. By adapting to the specific manuscript distribution, the pipeline reduces human annotation effort and improves transcription accuracy across subsequent pages. The authors apply this method to three manuscripts, release a dataset with detailed layout and Unicode annotations in PAGE‑XML format, and benchmark the pipeline against leading multimodal large language models.

By Kartik Chincholikar, Kaushik Gopalan, Mihir Hasabnis
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

RefLAM: A Reference-Grounded Line Annotation Pipeline for Historical Arabic Manuscripts

RefLAM is a pipeline that converts manuscript page images and clean transcriptions into validated, line-level ground truth for Arabic handwritten text recognition. It combines a deep‑learning page‑segmentation model, a multimodal large language model for structured OCR, and a diacritic‑agnostic fuzzy alignment engine that assigns a confidence score to each line, with a provable correctness guarantee for perfect scores. Using RefLAM, the authors achieved a 75× speedup over manual annotation and released AraMS‑28k, a dataset of 14 historical Arabic manuscripts with detailed annotations.

By Mohamed Guechaoui, Mohamed Diaa Zellagui, Souleyman Chaib, Sahraoui Dhelim
arXiv AI
Sep 4

How Far Can Synthetic Data Take Thai OCR?

The paper explores how synthetic data can be used to train a Thai OCR model without real OCR labels. By systematically varying factors such as typeface diversity, page structure, and handwriting glyphs, the authors identify which aspects of realism most improve transfer to real documents. Using these insights, they adapt a large PaddleOCR model into Wayu‑Paxa‑OCR‑Zero, achieving a median character error rate of 1.24% on printed pages and 20.55% on handwriting, outperforming existing Thai OCR systems.

By Kunat Pipatanakul
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Better

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 AI
Jul 21

DocOCR-Eval: A Correction-Based Framework for OCR Tool Selection Without Ground Truth

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
arXiv AI
Aug 11

TongGuOCR: A Layout-Aware and Token-Augmented OCR Framework for Chinese Historical Documents

arXiv:2608. 07917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and computational analysis.

By Zhongheng Zhou, Yi Sun, Huiguo He, Yuyi Zhang, Peirong Zhang, Yulin Fang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Lianwen Jin