arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

ASCIIBench: Evaluating Language-Model-Based Understanding of Visually-Oriented Text

ASCIIBench is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models on generating and classifying ASCII-text images, using a dataset of 5,315 labeled ASCII images. The authors also release a fine‑tuned CLIP model adapted to capture ASCII structure for evaluation. Their analysis shows that cosine similarity on CLIP embeddings fails to separate most categories, indicating a representation bottleneck rather than generational variance.

By Kerry Luo, Michael Fu, Joshua Peguero, Husnain Malik, Anvay Patil, Joyce Lin, Megan Van Overborg, Ryan Sarmiento, Kevin Zhu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

TextAlign: Preference Alignment for Text Rendering with Hierarchical Rewards

TextAlign is a post‑training preference‑alignment framework that improves text rendering in large text‑to‑image generative models without changing the generator architecture. It uses a hierarchical vision‑language model to reward global, word, and glyph‑level accuracy, converting binary defect judgments into a scalar preference signal that can be optimized with GRPO or DPO. Experiments on FLUX.1‑dev and Z‑Image‑Turbo demonstrate higher OCR‑based text accuracy while preserving overall generation quality, outperforming several foundation and text‑rendering baselines.

By Mingxuan Cui, Jingpu Yang, Fengxian Ji, Qian Jiang, Zhecheng Shi, Jiaming Wang, Zirui Song, Zhuohan Xie, Fajri Koto, Xiuying Chen