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.
arXiv:2608. 11741v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scholarly exegesis of ancient Chinese characters demands integrating visual observation, linguistic analysis, and historical context.
arXiv:2608.23507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Historical people may appear under different languages, scripts, and transcription traditions, while distinct individuals may share highly similar or...
Historical people may appear under different languages, scripts, and transcription traditions, while distinct individuals may share highly similar or even identical names. This makes historical identi...
CHisAgent is a multi‑agent large language model framework designed to build event taxonomies for ancient Chinese cultural contexts. It splits the task into three specialized stages: an Inducer that creates an initial hierarchy from raw historical texts, an Expander that adds missing intermediate concepts using LLM world knowledge, and an Enricher that incorporates external structured historical resources to ensure faithfulness. Applied to the Twenty‑Four Histories, CHisAgent produced a comprehensive, domain‑aware taxonomy covering politics, military, diplomacy, and social life, and evaluations show improved structural coherence, coverage, and cross‑cultural alignment.
Chinese ancient document understanding demands complex visual, linguistic, and historical reasoning. Current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically rely on an opaque, single-pass generation pa...
SAGE is a multi‑agent framework that transforms Chinese ancient document understanding from direct answer generation into evidence‑grounded inference. It orchestrates specialized agents for planning, evidence acquisition, claim verification, and bounded replanning within a shared‑state runtime, enabling evidence seeking, answer revision, and abstention when grounding is lacking. Experiments on the AncientDoc benchmark show that SAGE outperforms direct‑answering baselines across three LVLM backbones, and even a 9B‑parameter Qwen3.5 model surpasses larger monolithic LVLMs, underscoring the value of structured, evidence‑grounded inference over mere model scaling.
TRACE is a training‑free, agentic retrieval framework that enables accountable source discovery in historical archives, addressing challenges such as OCR degradation and genre heterogeneity. Developed for the DECIDON project on French Third Republic political discourse, it is deployed internally for 24 researchers across six institutions. On the HistoriQA‑ThirdRepublic benchmark, TRACE achieves R@10 of 0.856 and MRR of 0.653, outperforming sparse, dense, graph‑based, and other agentic RAG baselines, especially on multi‑hop and cross‑corpus questions, while costing only about $0.02 per question.
ClueWeaver is a dual-agent framework designed to enable compact, locally deployable language models to answer questions about long literary narratives. The Finder agent retrieves passages that contain answer-critical clues, while the Interpreter agent derives the answer from those passages, generates rationales with paragraph-ID citations, and performs self-calibration for high-risk questions. Both agents are trained with reward-guided reinforcement learning to prioritize evidence retention, correctness, grounding, and concise explanations, resulting in improved performance and inspectability over end-to-end prompting.
Was this person ever at that place, and if so, when? Answering such questions from noisy, multilingual historical documents is the central challenge of HIPE-2026, the third edition of the HIPE evaluation series.
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.
MIRAGE is a controlled study that examines how multimodal personal agents use historical evidence when conversation state changes. The study keeps evidence, questions, and scoring constant while varying only the conversation state, then checks if agents can determine answerability, recover the correct source, and answer from it. Results across seven multimodal backbones show distinct failure regimes before and after compaction, heavy reliance on context continuity by open-weight models, and mixed effects of retrieval pressure on source attribution.