The paper adapts the compact PP‑OCRv6 recognizer for historical text recognition and compares it to a conventional CRNN across various training regimes, including generalized pretraining, domain‑specific training, corpus‑level fine‑tuning, and manuscript‑specific few‑shot adaptation on multilingual Latin and Arabic scripts. While PP‑OCRv6 does not always beat the CRNN when trained from scratch, heterogeneous pretraining significantly improves its generalization. Additionally, fine‑tuned PP‑OCRv6 can surpass a large vision‑language model (Qwen3.5‑based Medusa) that is specifically tailored for historical Latin‑script handwriting recognition.
By Benjamin Kiessling (ALMAnaCH)
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
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
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
arXiv:2610.34148v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Optical character recognition (OCR) systems depend strongly on the scale and diversity of their training data. One approach to document OCR first analy...
By Majid Adibian, Hossein Saberi, Hossein Zeinali
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: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
arXiv:2607. 08143v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present the results of HIPE-OCRepair-2026, an ICDAR competition on LLM-assisted OCR post-correction of historical documents.
By Maud Ehrmann, Emanuela Boros, Juri Opitz, Andrianos Michail, Florian Wagner, Simon Clematide
The paper introduces an all‑in‑one multilingual scene text recognizer called ScriptMoE, which uses a script‑aware mixture‑of‑experts architecture to handle 10 scripts and 229 languages. It is built on a new large‑scale synthetic dataset, TextMuSS‑10M, and evaluated on the TextMuSS‑Bench, achieving 82.06% accuracy—1.31% higher than the best baseline. When integrated into the PP‑OCRv5 pipeline, ScriptMoE raises the end‑to‑end multilingual F1 score from 65.71% to 80.89%, slightly surpassing the best vision‑language model while using far fewer parameters.
By Xingsong Ye, Yongkun Du, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhixian Li, Chong Sun, Chen Li, Jing Lyu, Lianwen Jin, Zhineng Chen
arXiv:2606.19100v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open...
By Diogo Gl\'oria-Silva, Jo\~ao Cardeira, Manuel Letras da Luz, Afonso Simpl\'icio, Gon\c{c}alo Vinagre, Diogo Tavares, Rafael Ferreira, In\^es Calvo, In\^es Vieira, David Semedo, Jo\~ao Magalh\~aes
arXiv:2608. 07917v2 Announce Type: replace 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