WildHandBench is a new benchmark comprising 500 handwritten documents that span free text, tables, and formulas across four languages and nine real‑world scenarios. It introduces a Prior‑Driven Error (PDE) metric to assess whether mistakes stem from language priors rather than visual cues. In tests of 18 state‑of‑the‑art models, the best achieves only 71.85% accuracy, while humans reach 77.09%, and model errors are largely prior‑driven (63‑91%) compared to human errors (49%).
By Jun Zhang, Qiao Zhao, Cheng Cui, Jianying Qu, Zhongkai Sun, Jianwen Yang, Changda Zhou, ZhuoXin Liu, Shubin Han
While the top model on OmniDocBench now reaches 96.34% overall on printed-document parsing, the ability of current models to handle challenging handwritten documents remains largely uncharacterized. E...
arXiv:2502. 20295v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Handwriting text recognition (HTR) remains a challenging task.
By Benjamin Gutteridge, Matthew Thomas Jackson, Toni Kukurin, Xiaowen Dong
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
To train handwritten text recognition systems we need word images and their corresponding transcriptions, and these transcriptions are produced manually. For a script that can be read by only a small...
arXiv:2609.00232v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-centric document understanding and text-rich visual reasoning benchmar...
By Yue Zhou, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv:2609.16859v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: To train handwritten text recognition systems we need word images and their corresponding transcriptions, and these transcriptions are produced manua...
By Manglesh Kumar Pandey, Sumit Kumar Banshal
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-based benchmarks and increasingly focused on text-rich understanding, but their robustness under controlled visual degradation remains insufficiently understood. This gap is critical for OCR reasoning, where visual corruption can induce OCR errors and structural distortions, thereby introducing uncertainty into the reasoning task.
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
UniLipi is a unified multi‑script OCR model trained on 13 Indic scripts to recognize handwritten manuscripts under challenging conditions such as varied line geometry, length, and interruptions by non‑textual elements. It uses script‑aware synthetic data generation to perform well even with limited real annotated data. The model also predicts script identity and per‑line character counts, aiding manuscript cataloging, and its representations transfer to contemporary Indic handwriting and several non‑Indic scripts.
By Tathagata Ghosh, Sai Madhusudan Gunda, Simran Singh Sandral, Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla
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