arXiv Machine Learning

Real Data Closes Synthetic-to-Real Gap in Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

arXiv:2608. 09100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Millions of chemical structures appear in patents and papers only as drawings, and using that information at scale requires reading the drawings.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

VERDICT: Agreement Beats Pixel-Space Verification in Real-Document OCSR

The paper introduces VERDICT, a method for validating optical chemical structure recognition (OCSR) outputs by leveraging agreement among multiple recognizers rather than pixel‑space re‑rendering. On 263 ACS journal images, agreement achieved an AUROC of 0.916, far surpassing the 0.547 AUROC of re‑rendering similarity. VERDICT was applied to PMC Open Access, yielding over 6,000 high‑precision structure labels, and is integrated into SES AI’s Molecular Universe platform for image‑based molecular search.

By Yani Guan, Dengpan Dong, Shuang Luo, Zi Wei, Joah Han, Dan Hannah, Yumin Zhang, Qichao Hu, Kang Xu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

Beyond Balanced Accuracy: A Resolution and Parity-Controlled Benchmark for Vision-Language and Vision-Only Defect Assessment in UAV Power-Line Inspection

The paper evaluates the claim that vision‑language models (VLMs) outperform task‑specific vision backbones for UAV power‑line defect assessment using the ElecVQA‑Bench benchmark. Across various evaluation settings—partitioning, item sets, label spaces, replication, resolution, and side information—the performance gap between VLMs and traditional backbones is minimal or even reversed when controlling for resolution and token budget. The study concludes that VLM superiority is not universally supported and emphasizes the importance of rigorous benchmark audits.

By Linghao Zhang, Siyu Xiang, Junwei Kuang, Peiyu Yi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Can Scene Text Recognition Read Rare Compositions?

The paper reports that scene text recognition models, while achieving 89–97% accuracy on standard benchmarks, perform significantly worse on rare word–trigram combinations, with a 10–18 point drop in accuracy at the rare‑word/rare‑trigram corner across multiple languages and models. Scaling the vision backbone improves overall accuracy but does not alleviate this corner‑specific deficit. The authors identify the autoregressive decoder’s lexical prior as the root cause and show that architectural changes—specifically moving from autoregressive to CTC decoding—yield the largest improvement for these rare compositions.

By Genpei Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

Retrieved Images as Visual Thought: Training-Free Multimodal In-Context Learning for the Open-vs-Closed Gap

ReVisIT is a train‑free framework that turns retrieved image‑label pairs into units of visual thought, combining structured class definitions, multimodal retrieval, and alternating user/assistant injection before joint decoding. On several benchmarks—including Fast Open MiniImageNet, Bongard‑OpenWorld, and the newly released MAAC‑Bench—ReVisIT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing large, trained models while using far fewer parameters. The approach demonstrates that high‑quality retrieval and a simple turns layer can provide a universal performance boost across diverse multimodal tasks.

By Bingchen Huang, Zhiling Wang, Yifu Chen, Yuanchao Du
arXiv AI
Sep 12

Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?

arXiv:2609. 11916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera traps often run in the field on edge hardware with limited or no connectivity, making small, locally-deployable vision-language models (VLMs) -- not frontier-scale ones -- the practically relevant class to evaluate for species identification.

By William Zhou, Mayukha Siripuram, Xiao Yan, Ziqi Liu, Yi Ding
arXiv AI
2d ago

VisionQ: VLM-as-a-Judge Taxonomy, Dataset and Benchmark for Qualitative Analysis in Computer Vision

VisionQ is a new benchmark for qualitative analysis in computer vision that evaluates vision‑language models (VLMs) on criterion‑conditioned visual discrimination. It is built from over 1,800 peer‑reviewed comparison figures in CVPR and ICCV papers, linking each image crop to author‑stated visual claims through 3,911 hand‑annotated data points. The benchmark includes a 51‑leaf taxonomy of visual criteria, a protocol that hides method identities and reports accuracy per criterion, and a DPO‑tuned Gemma‑4‑E4B judge that improves accuracy on a held‑out test set.

By Vu Dinh Xuan, Duc-Hai Nguyen, Minh-Dung Dao, Vu Quynh Giao, Quang Hong Nguyen, Binh-Son Hua, Barry O'Sullivan, David Murphy, Hoang D. Nguyen