arXiv AI By Chen Peng, Shan Huang, Jianbo Huang, Linrui Qin, Qibo Sun, Mengwei Xu

When MLLMs miss what humans read: diagnosing and learning to read squint text

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The paper introduces the concept of Squint Text—text embedded in an image’s coarse structure that multimodal LLMs often miss but humans can read by squinting. It presents SquintBench, a dataset of 1,076 moderation images, and SquintCtrl, a synthetic suite for diagnosing the issue. The authors show that spatial selection is a key bottleneck and propose Squint OPSD, a training method that uses a downscaled teacher view and privileged transcription to supervise a student model, achieving a significant performance boost on SquintBench.

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