Beyond OCR Accuracy: Text-Centric VQA Under Image Degradation with Modular and End-to-End
Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
The paper investigates how to best integrate large language model (LLM) guidance into visual question answering (VQA) systems. By prompting the 70‑billion‑parameter Llama 3.3 model to identify visual concepts, distractors, and external facts for each question, the authors inject this guidance into a frozen Vision Transformer (ViT) and a T5 text‑to‑text model via two methods: decision‑level late fusion and attention‑matrix injection. On the OK‑VQA benchmark, the shallow late‑fusion approach outperforms the deeper attention injection, achieving 39.4% exact match versus 31.8%, and a paraphrasing pipeline further expands the training set tenfold, indicating that the depth of integration should match the data regime.
MEVL-STP introduces a two‑stage pipeline for spotting arbitrarily shaped scene text. The detection stage fuses features from six frozen vision encoders via a hierarchical Feature Pyramid Network and a Progressive Scale Expansion network to produce precise polygon masks. The recognition stage then crops these masks and feeds them to a fine‑tuned Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct model, achieving state‑of‑the‑art detection and end‑to‑end performance on CTW1500, Total‑Text, and ICDAR 2015 without synthetic pretraining.
The paper introduces a controlled benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on key‑value pair extraction from documents with varying levels of OCR noise. It tests 136 configurations across five instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs, three datasets, and four text‑quality conditions, using deterministic decoding to generate 17,688 document‑level inferences. The study finds that clean‑text performance does not reliably predict real‑world robustness, model rankings can reverse under noisy conditions, and few‑shot demonstrations do not always improve accuracy, highlighting reliability risks in OCR‑to‑LLM pipelines.
LensVLM is an inference framework and post‑training recipe that lets Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) process compressed images of text by selectively expanding only the relevant parts back to full resolution. Using Qwen3.5‑9B‑Base, LensVLM achieves accuracy comparable to full‑text models at 4.3× compression and outperforms other compression baselines up to 10.1× across seven text QA benchmarks, while also improving performance on multimodal document and code tasks as compression increases.
arXiv:2602. 00593v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite progress on general tasks, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with challenges that demand both fine-grained visual grounding and external knowledge, a synergy overlooked by existing benchmarks that evaluate these abilities in isolation.
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.