arXiv AI By Hongxin Xiang, Pengsen Ma, Yunkang Cao, Di Yu, Haowen Chen, Xinyu Yang, Xiangxiang Zeng

Rethinking Genomic Modeling Through Optical Character Recognition

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arXiv:2602. 02014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent genomic foundation models largely adopt large language model architectures that treat DNA as a one-dimensional token sequence.

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arXiv AI
Oct 9

SP-DocReader: Difference-Aware Self-Play for Precise Document OCR

SP-DocReader introduces a self‑play framework for OCR that focuses on residual errors after supervised fine‑tuning. It uses Reading Discrepancy Masking to align reference and generated tokens via a longest common subsequence and scores unmatched positions with full conditioning prefixes. The method adds a Focused Fidelity Loss for direct negative log‑likelihood supervision at unmatched ground‑truth positions, training only the OCR module while keeping the backbone frozen, and achieves significant character error rate reductions and ANLS improvements on multiple backbones.

By Wenjie Liao, Xiaohui Song, Liangjie Zhao, Haonan Lu
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.

By Zahra Anvari
arXiv AI
Oct 9

From Pixels to Structure: Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Document OCR and Structured JSON Extraction

The paper evaluates eight open‑source lightweight Vision‑Language Models (up to 7 B parameters) for converting document images into structured JSON, focusing on heritage collections with historical handwriting and non‑standard layouts. It compares zero‑shot, few‑shot, and fine‑tuned settings, measuring performance with CER, ANLS*, and mAP‑F1, and examines the effects of hyperparameter tuning, image preprocessing, and multi‑stage training. The study demonstrates that adapted VLMs can serve as a sustainable, private alternative to commercial OCR systems for institutional archives.

By Uddipan Basu Bir, Vincent Christlein, Andreas Maier, Mathias Zinnen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

Multilingual OCR-Aware Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models

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.

By Qinwu Xu, Yifan Jiang, Haoyu Ren
arXiv AI
Oct 2

LensVLM: Selective Context Expansion for Compressed Visual Representation of Text

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.

By Roy Xie, Dan Friedman, Donghan Yu, Bowen Pan, Christopher Fifty, Jang-Hyun Kim, Xianzhi Du, Zhe Gan, Vivek Rathod, Bhuwan Dhingra