arXiv AI
Reading or Guessing? Visual Grounding Failures of Vision-Language Models for OCR in Ancient Greek Editions
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arXiv AI
Sep 3
Do VLMs Read or Rewrite? On Transcription Faithfulness in Vision-Language Models
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."
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24
How Robust is OCR-Reasoning? Evaluating OCR-Reasoning Robustness of Vision-Language Models under Visual Perturbations
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-based benchmarks and increasingly focused on text-rich understanding, but their robustness under controlled visual degradation remains insufficiently understood. This gap is critical for OCR reasoning, where visual corruption can induce OCR errors and structural distortions, thereby introducing uncertainty into the reasoning task.
arXiv AI
Jul 7
When Simpler Is Better: Evaluating Translation Pipelines for Medieval Latin Manuscripts
arXiv:2607. 03836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite remarkable progress in machine translation, Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle on historical manuscripts, a domain that stresses core Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities: low-resource transliteration, archaic vocabulary, and noisy input signals.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28
When Low CER is Not Enough: An Analysis of Hallucinations in Vision-Language OCR Systems on Historical Uruguayan Documents
arXiv:2607. 24077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a key component in the digitization of historical archives.
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30
From Pixels to Pairs: A Comprehensive Benchmark of LLM-Driven Key-Value Extraction in Noisy Document Settings
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.
arXiv AI
3d ago
Entity-Aware Evaluation of OCR Systems for Historical Document Transcription
The paper introduces an entity‑aware evaluation framework for OCR systems applied to historical documents, focusing on how well names, dates, and identifiers are preserved. Using a benchmark of 175 Berrutti Archive documents and 5,209 manually annotated entity mentions, the authors compare sequence‑recognition OCR, OCR‑specialized vision‑language models, and general‑purpose vision‑language models. Their results show that OCR rankings vary with the evaluation criterion: Qwen 3.6 achieves the highest entity coverage, while some systems recover many entities when small character‑level errors are tolerated, indicating that aggregate transcription metrics alone do not capture meaningful information preservation.