Related papers: Hot-Start from Pixels: Low-Resolution Visual Token…
The glyphic writing system of Chinese incorporates information-rich visual features in each character, such as radicals that provide hints about meaning or pronunciation. However, there has been no investigation into whether contemporary…
Pixel-based language models process text rendered as images, which allows them to handle any script, making them a promising approach to open vocabulary language modelling. However, recent approaches use text renderers that produce a large…
Large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal variants can now process visual inputs, including images of text. This raises an intriguing question: can we compress textual inputs by feeding them as images to reduce token usage while…
Subword tokenization requires balancing computational efficiency and vocabulary coverage, which often leads to suboptimal performance on languages and scripts not prioritized during training. We propose to augment pretrained language models…
We introduce Chinese Text in the Wild, a very large dataset of Chinese text in street view images. While optical character recognition (OCR) in document images is well studied and many commercial tools are available, detection and…
Choosing an appropriate tokenization scheme is often a bottleneck in low-resource cross-lingual transfer. To understand the downstream implications of text representation choices, we perform a comparative analysis on language models having…
Tokenization is fundamental to pretrained language models (PLMs). Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs typically treat each character as an indivisible token. However, they ignore the unique feature of the Chinese writing system…
Recognition of Off-line Chinese characters is still a challenging problem, especially in historical documents, not only in the number of classes extremely large in comparison to contemporary image retrieval methods, but also new unseen…
Modern language models are internally -- and mathematically -- distributions over $\it{token}$ strings rather than $\it{character}$ strings, posing numerous challenges for programmers building user applications on top of them. For example,…
Scene Text Image Super-resolution (STISR) aims to recover high-resolution (HR) scene text images with visually pleasant and readable text content from the given low-resolution (LR) input. Most existing works focus on recovering English…
The handwriting of Chinese characters is a fundamental aspect of learning the Chinese language. Previous automated assessment methods often framed scoring as a regression problem. However, this score-only feedback lacks actionable guidance,…
Large pre-trained language models for textual data have an unconstrained output space; at each decoding step, they can produce any of 10,000s of sub-word tokens. When fine-tuned to target constrained formal languages like SQL, these models…
In the evolving landscape of multimodal language models, understanding the nuanced meanings conveyed through visual cues - such as satire, insult, or critique - remains a significant challenge. Existing evaluation benchmarks primarily focus…
We explore the potential of pixel-based models for transfer learning from standard languages to dialects. These models convert text into images that are divided into patches, enabling a continuous vocabulary representation that proves…
Given the advantage and recent success of English character-level and subword-unit models in several NLP tasks, we consider the equivalent modeling problem for Chinese. Chinese script is logographic and many Chinese logograms are composed…
Current image generation models struggle to reliably produce well-formed visual text. In this paper, we investigate a key contributing factor: popular text-to-image models lack character-level input features, making it much harder to…
Image tokenization, the process of transforming raw image pixels into a compact low-dimensional latent representation, has proven crucial for scalable and efficient image generation. However, mainstream image tokenization methods generally…
Chinese character recognition has attracted much research interest due to its wide applications. Although it has been studied for many years, some issues in this field have not been completely resolved yet, e.g. the zero-shot problem.…
It is intuitive that NLP tasks for logographic languages like Chinese should benefit from the use of the glyph information in those languages. However, due to the lack of rich pictographic evidence in glyphs and the weak generalization…
Scene text recognition has been studied for decades due to its broad applications. However, despite Chinese characters possessing different characteristics from Latin characters, such as complex inner structures and large categories, few…