arXiv:2608.29970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artistic Text Recognition (ATR) remains challenging because word images often combine decorative fonts, curved layouts, object-like characters, clutter...
Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly replacing traditional OCR for document understanding, but this study shows they often rewrite imperfect text into more plausible forms, a flaw that clean‑text OCR benchmarks miss. The authors created FaithC4, a multilingual perturbation benchmark of 1,455 single‑page documents with scramble, random substitution, and visually similar substitution attacks, and evaluated 15 systems across general‑purpose VLMs, OCR‑specialized VLMs, and traditional OCR pipelines. Results reveal that general‑purpose VLMs suffer up to 6.9 WER points under perturbation, OCR‑specialized VLMs 0.1–3.4 points, and traditional OCR less than 0.8 points on English; probing Qwen3‑VL‑4B shows rewriting occurs only when a perturbed word’s final‑layer representation remains close to the original, with short words (4–6 characters) rewritten up to 10% of the time. whyItMatters":"The findings highlight a critical limitation of VLMs in document transcription, underscoring the need for robust evaluation benchmarks that capture rewriting behavior beyond clean‑text accuracy."
arXiv:2604. 00725v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts.
arXiv:2608. 19385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Historical Arabic manuscript transcription is not only a recognition problem.
ET‑Prune is a training‑free framework that dynamically allocates visual token budgets in multimodal large language models based on question‑conditioned evidence. It protects text‑like spatial regions, converts evidence uncertainty into a token floor, and progressively prunes concentrated evidence while retaining diffuse or text‑dense tokens. In six backbone‑benchmark comparisons, ET‑Prune matches or outperforms other pruned methods while keeping roughly half the visual tokens, achieving notable gains on OCRBench‑v2 and MMBench v1.1.
arXiv:2606. 14299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment.
arXiv:2607. 23271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contrastive vision-language models such as CLIP map semantically opposite phrases (e.
The paper introduces Sparse Readout Prism (SRP), a method that decomposes a language model’s readout matrix into sparse features, allowing logit‑lens scores to be expressed as sums of feature contributions. SRP reveals that lens readings depend on the corpus used to fit the readout, a phenomenon called corpus conditionality, and that the dominant readout feature remains stable across different corpora. By replacing the original readout with SRP’s sparse approximation, the authors recover 8.9–17.3 percentage points more of the tested logit differences than six geometric‑relation baselines, and ablating features shifts logit differences proportionally to their SRP contributions.
The paper examines OCR adaptation for low‑resource languages, noting that fine‑tuning often hits a performance ceiling in data‑scarce settings. It identifies that lower layers of language‑specific models learn redundant features while higher layers capture script nuances, leading to a structural inefficiency. To address this, the authors propose PSMC, a framework that pre‑trains a base model, specializes it per language, merges the experts via task arithmetic, and co‑trains a unified multilingual backbone, achieving about a 2% improvement in Word Recognition Rate across 10 Indian scripts without adding parameters.
arXiv:2603. 18482v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard decoding strategies for text generation, including top-$k$, nucleus sampling, and contrastive search, select tokens based on likelihood, restricting outputs to high-probability regions.
The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.
The paper evaluates the tablet‑2 long‑term memory engine on multilingual text benchmarks and cross‑lingual photo retrieval without lexical matching. Tablet‑2 achieves high accuracy on LongMemEval‑S (95.7%) and moderate accuracy on BEAM‑1M (67.5%), with minimal variance across runs. In multimodal tests, it outperforms BM25 on image‑cell recall and shows significant language‑dependent performance gaps, especially for low‑resource languages.