The paper investigates how to combine synthetic and real historical images to improve OCR for the endangered Manchu language. Using 60,000 synthetic and 20,306 real word images, the authors evaluate three vision‑language models and a compact CRNN across synthetic‑only, real‑only, joint, and sequential training regimes. Adding real data boosts word accuracy to 95–96%, and ensembling the best recognizers raises it to 98.27% without further training.
By Yan Hon Michael Chung, Hanlin Wang
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.
By Merveilles Agbeti-Messan, Pierrick Tranouez, St\'ephane Nicolas, Cl\'ement Chatelain, Thierry Paquet
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:2607. 03994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern language models generally represent text as sequences of discrete token embeddings, an assumption deeply rooted in current practice but rarely questioned.
By Shuyang Xiang, Hao Guan
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.
By Achyuth P, Kahaan Shah, Chetan Arora
Ancient-Bench is a new benchmark for recognizing text on ancient Chinese artifacts, comprising 2,700 images that span 3,000 years of character evolution, nine artifact categories, and seven historical script forms. It introduces three annotation standards—symbol, character, and parsing standardization—to accommodate medium‑specific characteristics and enable consistent evaluation. Experiments show that current Vision‑Language Models and OCR specialists still struggle with variant characters, specialized symbols, and hallucination, indicating the task remains largely unsolved.
By Hiuyi Cheng, Nuo Xu, Yuyi Zhang, Xuhan Zheng, Wei Pan, Jing Zhang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Yihua Teng, Jihao Wu, Haoyu Ren, Lianwen Jin
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
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."
By Gwang Gook Lee, Kenan Emir Ak, Jay Mohta, Yan Xu, Dimitrios Dimitriadis
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
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
arXiv:2607. 24077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a key component in the digitization of historical archives.
By Marina Gardella (CB), Camilo Mari{\~n}o (UDELAR, CB), Diego Belzarena (UDELAR, CB), Ignacio Ram{\'i}rez (UDELAR), Gregory Randall (UDELAR), Jean-Michel Morel (LU - Hong Kong)
The scholarly exegesis of ancient Chinese characters demands integrating visual observation, linguistic analysis, and historical context. However, existing computational approaches focus narrowly on subtasks such as character recognition and retrieval, lacking the structured datasets and benchmarks required for comprehensive scholarly analysis.