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Recently, there has been significant interest in enhancing the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to process high-resolution images. Most existing methods focus on adopting a cropping strategy to improve the ability of multimodal large language models to understand image details. However, this cropping operation inevitably causes the segmentation of objects and connected areas, which impairs the MLLM's ability to recognize small or irregularly shaped objects or text. This issue is particularly evident in lightweight MLLMs. Addressing this issue, we propose Mini-Monkey, a lightweight MLLM that incorporates a plug-and-play method called multi-scale adaptive crop strategy (MSAC). Mini-Monkey adaptively generates multi-scale representations, allowing it to select non-segmented objects from various scales. To mitigate the computational overhead introduced by MSAC, we propose a Scale Compression Mechanism (SCM), which effectively compresses image tokens. Mini-Monkey achieves state-of-the-art performance among 2B-parameter MLLMs. It not only demonstrates leading performance on a variety of general multimodal understanding tasks but also shows consistent improvements in document understanding capabilities. On the OCRBench, Mini-Monkey achieves a score of 802, outperforming 8B-parameter state-of-the-art model InternVL2-8B. Besides, our model and training strategy are very efficient, which can be trained with only eight RTX 3090. The code is available at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/Monkey.

Recent Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) usually only provide users with the inference APIs, namely the emerging Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) setting. To adapt MaaS PLMs to downstream tasks without accessing their parameters and gradients, some existing methods focus on the output-side adaptation of PLMs, viewing the PLM as an encoder and then optimizing a task-specific decoder for decoding the output hidden states and class scores of the PLM. Despite the effectiveness of these methods, they only use a single prompt to query PLMs for decoding, leading to a heavy reliance on the quality of the adopted prompt. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Multi-Prompting Decoder (MPD) framework for MaaS adaptation. The core idea is to query PLMs with multiple different prompts for each sample, thereby obtaining multiple output hidden states and class scores for subsequent decoding. Such multi-prompting decoding paradigm can simultaneously mitigate reliance on the quality of a single prompt, alleviate the issue of data scarcity under the few-shot setting, and provide richer knowledge extracted from PLMs. Specifically, we propose two decoding strategies: multi-prompting decoding with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting.

The sparsely activated mixture of experts (MoE) model presents a promising alternative to traditional densely activated (dense) models, enhancing both quality and computational efficiency. However, training MoE models from scratch demands extensive data and computational resources. Moreover, public repositories like timm mainly provide pre-trained dense checkpoints, lacking similar resources for MoE models, hindering their adoption. To bridge this gap, we introduce MoE Jetpack, an effective method for fine-tuning dense checkpoints into MoE models. MoE Jetpack incorporates two key techniques: (1) checkpoint recycling, which repurposes dense checkpoints as initial weights for MoE models, thereby accelerating convergence, enhancing accuracy, and alleviating the computational burden of pre-training; (2) hyperspherical adaptive MoE (SpheroMoE) layer, which optimizes the MoE architecture for better integration of dense checkpoints, enhancing fine-tuning performance. Our experiments on vision tasks demonstrate that MoE Jetpack significantly improves convergence speed and accuracy when fine-tuning dense checkpoints into MoE models. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Adlith/MoE-Jetpack., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

Oracle Bone Inscriptions is one of the oldest existing forms of writing in the world. However, due to the great antiquity of the era, a large number of Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBI) remain undeciphered, making it one of the global challenges in the field of paleography today. This paper introduces a novel approach, namely Puzzle Pieces Picker (P$^3$), to decipher these enigmatic characters through radical reconstruction. We deconstruct OBI into foundational strokes and radicals, then employ a Transformer model to reconstruct them into their modern (conterpart)\textcolor{blue}{counterparts}, offering a groundbreaking solution to ancient script analysis. To further this endeavor, a new Ancient Chinese Character Puzzles (ACCP) dataset was developed, comprising an extensive collection of character images from seven key historical stages, annotated with detailed radical sequences. The experiments have showcased considerable promising insights, underscoring the potential and effectiveness of our approach in deciphering the intricacies of ancient Chinese scripts. Through this novel dataset and methodology, we aim to bridge the gap between traditional philology and modern document analysis techniques, offering new insights into the rich history of Chinese linguistic heritage., Comment: ICDAR 2024

In this study, we investigate whether attention-based information flow inside large language models (LLMs) is aggregated through noticeable patterns for long context processing. Our observations reveal that LLMs aggregate information through Pyramidal Information Funneling where attention is scattering widely in lower layers, progressively consolidating within specific contexts, and ultimately focusin on critical tokens (a.k.a massive activation or attention sink) in higher layers. Motivated by these insights, we developed PyramidKV, a novel and effective KV cache compression method. This approach dynamically adjusts the KV cache size across different layers, allocating more cache in lower layers and less in higher ones, diverging from traditional methods that maintain a uniform KV cache size. Our experimental evaluations, utilizing the LongBench benchmark, show that PyramidKV matches the performance of models with a full KV cache while retaining only 12% of the KV cache, thus significantly reducing memory usage. In scenarios emphasizing memory efficiency, where only 0.7% of the KV cache is maintained, PyramidKV surpasses other KV cache compression techniques achieving up to a 20.5 absolute accuracy improvement on TREC.

Originating from China's Shang Dynasty approximately 3,000 years ago, the Oracle Bone Script (OBS) is a cornerstone in the annals of linguistic history, predating many established writing systems. Despite the discovery of thousands of inscriptions, a vast expanse of OBS remains undeciphered, casting a veil of mystery over this ancient language. The emergence of modern AI technologies presents a novel frontier for OBS decipherment, challenging traditional NLP methods that rely heavily on large textual corpora, a luxury not afforded by historical languages. This paper introduces a novel approach by adopting image generation techniques, specifically through the development of Oracle Bone Script Decipher (OBSD). Utilizing a conditional diffusion-based strategy, OBSD generates vital clues for decipherment, charting a new course for AI-assisted analysis of ancient languages. To validate its efficacy, extensive experiments were conducted on an oracle bone script dataset, with quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness of OBSD. Code and decipherment results will be made available at https://github.com/guanhaisu/OBSD., Comment: ACL2024 main conference long paper

The development of Urdu scene text detection, recognition, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) technologies is crucial for advancing accessibility, information retrieval, and linguistic diversity in digital content, facilitating better understanding and interaction with Urdu-language visual data. This initiative seeks to bridge the gap between textual and visual comprehension. We propose a new multi-task Urdu scene text dataset comprising over 1000 natural scene images, which can be used for text detection, recognition, and VQA tasks. We provide fine-grained annotations for text instances, addressing the limitations of previous datasets for facing arbitrary-shaped texts. By incorporating additional annotation points, this dataset facilitates the development and assessment of methods that can handle diverse text layouts, intricate shapes, and non-standard orientations commonly encountered in real-world scenarios. Besides, the VQA annotations make it the first benchmark for the Urdu Text VQA method, which can prompt the development of Urdu scene text understanding. The proposed dataset is available at: https://github.com/Hiba-MeiRuan/Urdu-VQA-Dataset-/tree/main, Comment: Accepted by the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2024

Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) in its proper format not only facilitates human-machine interaction in text-centric visual environments but also serves as a de facto gold proxy to evaluate AI models in the domain of text-centric scene understanding. Nonetheless, most existing TEC-VQA benchmarks have focused on high-resource languages like English and Chinese. Despite pioneering works to expand multilingual QA pairs in non-text-centric VQA datasets through translation engines, the translation-based protocol encounters a substantial "visual-textual misalignment" problem when applied to TEC-VQA. Specifically, it prioritizes the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding the visual text present in images. Moreover, it fails to address complexities related to nuanced meaning, contextual distortion, language bias, and question-type diversity. In this work, we tackle multilingual TEC-VQA by introducing MTVQA, the first benchmark featuring high-quality human expert annotations across 9 diverse languages, consisting of 6,778 question-answer pairs across 2,116 images. Further, by comprehensively evaluating numerous state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), including GPT-4o, GPT-4V, Claude3, and Gemini, on the MTVQA dataset, it is evident that there is still a large room for performance improvement, underscoring the value of MTVQA. Additionally, we supply multilingual training data within the MTVQA dataset, demonstrating that straightforward fine-tuning with this data can substantially enhance multilingual TEC-VQA performance. We aspire that MTVQA will offer the research community fresh insights and stimulate further exploration in multilingual visual text comprehension. The project homepage is available at https://bytedance.github.io/MTVQA/.

Scene text recognition is essential in many applications, including automated translation, information retrieval, driving assistance, and enhancing accessibility for individuals with visual impairments. Much research has been done to improve the accuracy and performance of scene text detection and recognition models. However, most of this research has been conducted in the most common languages, English and Chinese. There is a significant gap in low-resource languages, especially the Swahili Language. Swahili is widely spoken in East African countries but is still an under-explored language in scene text recognition. No studies have been focused explicitly on Swahili natural scene text detection and recognition, and no dataset for Swahili language scene text detection and recognition is publicly available. We propose a comprehensive dataset of Swahili scene text images and evaluate the dataset on different scene text detection and recognition models. The dataset contains 976 images collected in different places and under various circumstances. Each image has its annotation at the word level. The proposed dataset can also serve as a benchmark dataset specific to the Swahili language for evaluating and comparing different approaches and fostering future research endeavors. The dataset is available on GitHub via this link: https://github.com/FadilaW/Swahili-STR-Dataset, Comment: Accepted to ICDAR 2024

While large multi-modal models (LMM) have shown notable progress in multi-modal tasks, their capabilities in tasks involving dense textual content remains to be fully explored. Dense text, which carries important information, is often found in documents, tables, and product descriptions. Understanding dense text enables us to obtain more accurate information, assisting in making better decisions. To further explore the capabilities of LMM in complex text tasks, we propose the DT-VQA dataset, with 170k question-answer pairs. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of GPT4V, Gemini, and various open-source LMMs on our dataset, revealing their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of two strategies for LMM: prompt engineering and downstream fine-tuning. We find that even with automatically labeled training datasets, significant improvements in model performance can be achieved. We hope that this research will promote the study of LMM in dense text tasks. Code will be released at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/MultimodalOCR.

Text spotting, a task involving the extraction of textual information from image or video sequences, faces challenges in cross-domain adaption, such as image-to-image and image-to-video generalization. In this paper, we introduce a new method, termed VimTS, which enhances the generalization ability of the model by achieving better synergy among different tasks. Typically, we propose a Prompt Queries Generation Module and a Tasks-aware Adapter to effectively convert the original single-task model into a multi-task model suitable for both image and video scenarios with minimal additional parameters. The Prompt Queries Generation Module facilitates explicit interaction between different tasks, while the Tasks-aware Adapter helps the model dynamically learn suitable features for each task. Additionally, to further enable the model to learn temporal information at a lower cost, we propose a synthetic video text dataset (VTD-368k) by leveraging the Content Deformation Fields (CoDeF) algorithm. Notably, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by an average of 2.6% in six cross-domain benchmarks such as TT-to-IC15, CTW1500-to-TT, and TT-to-CTW1500. For video-level cross-domain adaption, our method even surpasses the previous end-to-end video spotting method in ICDAR2015 video and DSText v2 by an average of 5.5% on the MOTA metric, using only image-level data. We further demonstrate that existing Large Multimodal Models exhibit limitations in generating cross-domain scene text spotting, in contrast to our VimTS model which requires significantly fewer parameters and data. The code and datasets will be made available at the https://VimTextSpotter.github.io.

Text-centric visual question answering (VQA) has made great strides with the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet open-source models still fall short of leading models like GPT4V and Gemini, partly due to a lack of extensive, high-quality instruction tuning data. To this end, we introduce a new approach for creating a massive, high-quality instruction-tuning dataset, Square-10M, which is generated using closed-source MLLMs. The data construction process, termed Square, consists of four steps: Self-Questioning, Answering, Reasoning, and Evaluation. Our experiments with Square-10M led to three key findings: 1) Our model, TextSquare, considerably surpasses open-source previous state-of-the-art Text-centric MLLMs and sets a new standard on OCRBench(62.2%). It even outperforms top-tier models like GPT4V and Gemini in 6 of 10 text-centric benchmarks. 2) Additionally, we demonstrate the critical role of VQA reasoning data in offering comprehensive contextual insights for specific questions. This not only improves accuracy but also significantly mitigates hallucinations. Specifically, TextSquare scores an average of 75.1% across four general VQA and hallucination evaluation datasets, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models. 3) Notably, the phenomenon observed in scaling text-centric VQA datasets reveals a vivid pattern: the exponential increase of instruction tuning data volume is directly proportional to the improvement in model performance, thereby validating the necessity of the dataset scale and the high quality of Square-10M.

Modularity plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of complex systems. While end-to-end text spotting efficiently mitigates the issues of error accumulation and sub-optimal performance seen in traditional two-step methodologies, the two-step methods continue to be favored in many competitions and practical settings due to their superior modularity. In this paper, we introduce Bridging Text Spotting, a novel approach that resolves the error accumulation and suboptimal performance issues in two-step methods while retaining modularity. To achieve this, we adopt a well-trained detector and recognizer that are developed and trained independently and then lock their parameters to preserve their already acquired capabilities. Subsequently, we introduce a Bridge that connects the locked detector and recognizer through a zero-initialized neural network. This zero-initialized neural network, initialized with weights set to zeros, ensures seamless integration of the large receptive field features in detection into the locked recognizer. Furthermore, since the fixed detector and recognizer cannot naturally acquire end-to-end optimization features, we adopt the Adapter to facilitate their efficient learning of these features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through extensive experiments: Connecting the latest detector and recognizer through Bridging Text Spotting, we achieved an accuracy of 83.3% on Total-Text, 69.8% on CTW1500, and 89.5% on ICDAR 2015. The code is available at https://github.com/mxin262/Bridging-Text-Spotting., Comment: Accepted by CVPR2024

Recently, visually-situated text parsing (VsTP) has experienced notable advancements, driven by the increasing demand for automated document understanding and the emergence of Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of processing document-based questions. Various methods have been proposed to address the challenging problem of VsTP. However, due to the diversified targets and heterogeneous schemas, previous works usually design task-specific architectures and objectives for individual tasks, which inadvertently leads to modal isolation and complex workflow. In this paper, we propose a unified paradigm for parsing visually-situated text across diverse scenarios. Specifically, we devise a universal model, called OmniParser, which can simultaneously handle three typical visually-situated text parsing tasks: text spotting, key information extraction, and table recognition. In OmniParser, all tasks share the unified encoder-decoder architecture, the unified objective: point-conditioned text generation, and the unified input & output representation: prompt & structured sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed OmniParser achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) or highly competitive performances on 7 datasets for the three visually-situated text parsing tasks, despite its unified, concise design. The code is available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery., Comment: CVPR 2024

We present TextMonkey, a large multimodal model (LMM) tailored for text-centric tasks. Our approach introduces enhancement across several dimensions: By adopting Shifted Window Attention with zero-initialization, we achieve cross-window connectivity at higher input resolutions and stabilize early training; We hypothesize that images may contain redundant tokens, and by using similarity to filter out significant tokens, we can not only streamline the token length but also enhance the model's performance. Moreover, by expanding our model's capabilities to encompass text spotting and grounding, and incorporating positional information into responses, we enhance interpretability. It also learns to perform screenshot tasks through finetuning. Evaluation on 12 benchmarks shows notable improvements: 5.2% in Scene Text-Centric tasks (including STVQA, TextVQA, and OCRVQA), 6.9% in Document-Oriented tasks (such as DocVQA, InfoVQA, ChartVQA, DeepForm, Kleister Charity, and WikiTableQuestions), and 2.8% in Key Information Extraction tasks (comprising FUNSD, SROIE, and POIE). It outperforms in scene text spotting with a 10.9\% increase and sets a new standard on OCRBench, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 29 OCR-related assessments, with a score of 561, surpassing previous open-sourced large multimodal models for document understanding. Code will be released at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/Monkey.

In light of recent advances in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs), there is increasing attention to scaling them from image-text data to more informative real-world videos. Compared to static images, video poses unique challenges for effective large-scale pre-training due to the modeling of its spatiotemporal dynamics. In this paper, we address such limitations in video-language pre-training with an efficient video decomposition that represents each video as keyframes and temporal motions. These are then adapted to an LLM using well-designed tokenizers that discretize visual and temporal information as a few tokens, thus enabling unified generative pre-training of videos, images, and text. At inference, the generated tokens from the LLM are carefully recovered to the original continuous pixel space to create various video content. Our proposed framework is both capable of comprehending and generating image and video content, as demonstrated by its competitive performance across 13 multimodal benchmarks in image and video understanding and generation. Our code and models are available at https://video-lavit.github.io.

Oracle Bone Script (OBS), one of the earliest known forms of ancient Chinese writing, holds invaluable insights into the humanities and geography of the Shang Dynasty, dating back 3,000 years. The immense historical and cultural significance of these writings cannot be overstated. However, the passage of time has obscured much of their meaning, presenting a significant challenge in deciphering these ancient texts. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), employing AI to assist in interpreting OBS has become a feasible option. Yet, progress in this area has been hindered by a lack of high-quality datasets. To address this issue, this paper details the creation of the HUST-OBS dataset. This dataset encompasses 77,064 images of 1,588 individual deciphered scripts and 62,989 images of 9,411 undeciphered characters, with a total of 140,053 images, compiled from diverse sources. Additionally, all images and labels have been reviewed and corrected by experts in oracle bone studies. The hope is that this dataset could inspire and assist future research in deciphering those unknown OBS. All the codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Pengjie-W/HUST-OBC.

The earliest extant Chinese characters originate from oracle bone inscriptions, which are closely related to other East Asian languages. These inscriptions hold immense value for anthropology and archaeology. However, deciphering oracle bone script remains a formidable challenge, with only approximately 1,600 of the over 4,500 extant characters elucidated to date. Further scholarly investigation is required to comprehensively understand this ancient writing system. Artificial Intelligence technology is a promising avenue for deciphering oracle bone characters, particularly concerning their evolution. However, one of the challenges is the lack of datasets mapping the evolution of these characters over time. In this study, we systematically collected ancient characters from authoritative texts and websites spanning six historical stages: Oracle Bone Characters - OBC (15th century B.C.), Bronze Inscriptions - BI (13th to 221 B.C.), Seal Script - SS (11th to 8th centuries B.C.), Spring and Autumn period Characters - SAC (770 to 476 B.C.), Warring States period Characters - WSC (475 B.C. to 221 B.C.), and Clerical Script - CS (221 B.C. to 220 A.D.). Subsequently, we constructed an extensive dataset, namely EVolution Oracle Bone Characters (EVOBC), consisting of 229,170 images representing 13,714 distinct character categories. We conducted validation and simulated deciphering on the constructed dataset, and the results demonstrate its high efficacy in aiding the study of oracle bone script. This openly accessible dataset aims to digitalize ancient Chinese scripts across multiple eras, facilitating the decipherment of oracle bone script by examining the evolution of glyph forms.

The advancement of text shape representations towards compactness has enhanced text detection and spotting performance, but at a high annotation cost. Current models use single-point annotations to reduce costs, yet they lack sufficient localization information for downstream applications. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Point2Polygon, which can efficiently transform single-points into compact polygons. Our method uses a coarse-to-fine process, starting with creating and selecting anchor points based on recognition confidence, then vertically and horizontally refining the polygon using recognition information to optimize its shape. We demonstrate the accuracy of the generated polygons through extensive experiments: 1) By creating polygons from ground truth points, we achieved an accuracy of 82.0% on ICDAR 2015; 2) In training detectors with polygons generated by our method, we attained 86% of the accuracy relative to training with ground truth (GT); 3) Additionally, the proposed Point2Polygon can be seamlessly integrated to empower single-point spotters to generate polygons. This integration led to an impressive 82.5% accuracy for the generated polygons. It is worth mentioning that our method relies solely on synthetic recognition information, eliminating the need for any manual annotation beyond single points., Comment: Accepted in ICDAR 2024

With the surge in realistic text tampering, detecting fraudulent text in images has gained prominence for maintaining information security. However, the high costs associated with professional text manipulation and annotation limit the availability of real-world datasets, with most relying on synthetic tampering, which inadequately replicates real-world tampering attributes. To address this issue, we present the Real Text Manipulation (RTM) dataset, encompassing 14,250 text images, which include 5,986 manually and 5,258 automatically tampered images, created using a variety of techniques, alongside 3,006 unaltered text images for evaluating solution stability. Our evaluations indicate that existing methods falter in text forgery detection on the RTM dataset. We propose a robust baseline solution featuring a Consistency-aware Aggregation Hub and a Gated Cross Neighborhood-attention Fusion module for efficient multi-modal information fusion, supplemented by a Tampered-Authentic Contrastive Learning module during training, enriching feature representation distinction. This framework, extendable to other dual-stream architectures, demonstrated notable localization performance improvements of 7.33% and 6.38% on manual and overall manipulations, respectively. Our contributions aim to propel advancements in real-world text tampering detection. Code and dataset will be made available at https://github.com/DrLuo/RTM, Comment: The paper needs to be improved

Despite Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 achieving impressive results in function-level code generation, they struggle with repository-scale code understanding (e.g., coming up with the right arguments for calling routines), requiring a deeper comprehension of complex file interactions. Also, recently, people have developed LLM agents that attempt to interact with repository code (e.g., compiling and evaluating its execution), prompting the need to evaluate their performance. These gaps have motivated our development of ML-Bench, a benchmark rooted in real-world programming applications that leverage existing code repositories to perform tasks. Addressing the need for LLMs to interpret long code contexts and translate instructions into precise, executable scripts, ML-Bench encompasses annotated 9,641 examples across 18 GitHub repositories, challenging LLMs to accommodate user-specified arguments and documentation intricacies effectively. To evaluate both LLMs and AI agents, two setups are employed: ML-LLM-Bench for assessing LLMs' text-to-code conversion within a predefined deployment environment, and ML-Agent-Bench for testing autonomous agents in an end-to-end task execution within a Linux sandbox environment. Our findings indicate that while GPT-4o leads with a Pass@5 rate surpassing 50%, there remains significant scope for improvement, highlighted by issues such as hallucinated outputs and difficulties with bash script generation. Notably, in the more demanding ML-Agent-Bench, GPT-4o achieves a 76.47% success rate, reflecting the efficacy of iterative action and feedback in complex task resolution. Our code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/gersteinlab/ML-bench.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promise in vision-language tasks but struggle with high-resolution input and detailed scene understanding. Addressing these challenges, we introduce Monkey to enhance LMM capabilities. Firstly, Monkey processes input images by dividing them into uniform patches, each matching the size (e.g., 448x448) used in the original training of the well-trained vision encoder. Equipped with individual adapter for each patch, Monkey can handle higher resolutions up to 1344x896 pixels, enabling the detailed capture of complex visual information. Secondly, it employs a multi-level description generation method, enriching the context for scene-object associations. This two-part strategy ensures more effective learning from generated data: the higher resolution allows for a more detailed capture of visuals, which in turn enhances the effectiveness of comprehensive descriptions. Extensive ablative results validate the effectiveness of our designs. Additionally, experiments on 18 datasets further demonstrate that Monkey surpasses existing LMMs in many tasks like Image Captioning and various Visual Question Answering formats. Specially, in qualitative tests focused on dense text question answering, Monkey has exhibited encouraging results compared with GPT4V. Code is available at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/Monkey.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in handling a variety of natural language processing (NLP) downstream tasks, even on mathematical tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. In this report, we introduce the KwaiYiiMath which enhances the mathematical reasoning abilities of KwaiYiiBase1, by applying Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforced Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), including on both English and Chinese mathematical tasks. Meanwhile, we also constructed a small-scale Chinese primary school mathematics test set (named KMath), consisting of 188 examples to evaluate the correctness of the problem-solving process generated by the models. Empirical studies demonstrate that KwaiYiiMath can achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on GSM8k, CMath, and KMath compared with the similar size models, respectively., Comment: technical report. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2306.16636 by other authors

We exploit the potential of the large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model to enhance scene text detection and spotting tasks, transforming it into a robust backbone, FastTCM-CR50. This backbone utilizes visual prompt learning and cross-attention in CLIP to extract image and text-based prior knowledge. Using predefined and learnable prompts, FastTCM-CR50 introduces an instance-language matching process to enhance the synergy between image and text embeddings, thereby refining text regions. Our Bimodal Similarity Matching (BSM) module facilitates dynamic language prompt generation, enabling offline computations and improving performance. FastTCM-CR50 offers several advantages: 1) It can enhance existing text detectors and spotters, improving performance by an average of 1.7% and 1.5%, respectively. 2) It outperforms the previous TCM-CR50 backbone, yielding an average improvement of 0.2% and 0.56% in text detection and spotting tasks, along with a 48.5% increase in inference speed. 3) It showcases robust few-shot training capabilities. Utilizing only 10% of the supervised data, FastTCM-CR50 improves performance by an average of 26.5% and 5.5% for text detection and spotting tasks, respectively. 4) It consistently enhances performance on out-of-distribution text detection and spotting datasets, particularly the NightTime-ArT subset from ICDAR2019-ArT and the DOTA dataset for oriented object detection. The code is available at https://github.com/wenwenyu/TCM., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2302.14338

In recent years, end-to-end scene text spotting approaches are evolving to the Transformer-based framework. While previous studies have shown the crucial importance of the intrinsic synergy between text detection and recognition, recent advances in Transformer-based methods usually adopt an implicit synergy strategy with shared query, which can not fully realize the potential of these two interactive tasks. In this paper, we argue that the explicit synergy considering distinct characteristics of text detection and recognition can significantly improve the performance text spotting. To this end, we introduce a new model named Explicit Synergy-based Text Spotting Transformer framework (ESTextSpotter), which achieves explicit synergy by modeling discriminative and interactive features for text detection and recognition within a single decoder. Specifically, we decompose the conventional shared query into task-aware queries for text polygon and content, respectively. Through the decoder with the proposed vision-language communication module, the queries interact with each other in an explicit manner while preserving discriminative patterns of text detection and recognition, thus improving performance significantly. Additionally, we propose a task-aware query initialization scheme to ensure stable training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mxin262/ESTextSpotter., Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023

Conditional spatial queries are recently introduced into DEtection TRansformer (DETR) to accelerate convergence. In DAB-DETR, such queries are modulated by the so-called conditional linear projection at each decoder stage, aiming to search for positions of interest such as the four extremities of the box. Each decoder stage progressively updates the box by predicting the anchor box offsets, while in cross-attention only the box center is informed as the reference point. The use of only box center, however, leaves the width and height of the previous box unknown to the current stage, which hinders accurate prediction of offsets. We argue that the explicit use of the entire box information in cross-attention matters. In this work, we propose Box Agent to condense the box into head-specific agent points. By replacing the box center with the agent point as the reference point in each head, the conditional cross-attention can search for positions from a more reasonable starting point by considering the full scope of the previous box, rather than always from the previous box center. This significantly reduces the burden of the conditional linear projection. Experimental results show that the box agent leads to not only faster convergence but also improved detection performance, e.g., our single-scale model achieves $44.2$ AP with ResNet-50 based on DAB-DETR. Our Box Agent requires minor modifications to the code and has negligible computational workload. Code is available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/box-detr., Comment: 11 pages

We introduce the notion of point affiliation into feature upsampling. By abstracting a feature map into non-overlapped semantic clusters formed by points of identical semantic meaning, feature upsampling can be viewed as point affiliation -- designating a semantic cluster for each upsampled point. In the framework of kernel-based dynamic upsampling, we show that an upsampled point can resort to its low-res decoder neighbors and high-res encoder point to reason the affiliation, conditioned on the mutual similarity between them. We therefore present a generic formulation for generating similarity-aware upsampling kernels and prove that such kernels encourage not only semantic smoothness but also boundary sharpness. This formulation constitutes a novel, lightweight, and universal upsampling solution, Similarity-Aware Point Affiliation (SAPA). We show its working mechanism via our preliminary designs with window-shape kernel. After probing the limitations of the designs on object detection, we reveal additional insights for upsampling, leading to SAPA with the dynamic kernel shape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAPA outperforms prior upsamplers and invites consistent performance improvements on a number of dense prediction tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, image matting, and depth estimation. Code is made available at: https://github.com/tiny-smart/sapa, Comment: 17 pages. Extended version of NeurIPS 2022 paper "SAPA: Similarity-Aware Point Affiliation for Feature Upsampling" at arXiv:2209.12866v1. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2209.12866

Scene text removal (STR) aims at replacing text strokes in natural scenes with visually coherent backgrounds. Recent STR approaches rely on iterative refinements or explicit text masks, resulting in high complexity and sensitivity to the accuracy of text localization. Moreover, most existing STR methods adopt convolutional architectures while the potential of vision Transformers (ViTs) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a simple-yet-effective ViT-based text eraser, dubbed ViTEraser. Following a concise encoder-decoder framework, ViTEraser can easily incorporate various ViTs to enhance long-range modeling. Specifically, the encoder hierarchically maps the input image into the hidden space through ViT blocks and patch embedding layers, while the decoder gradually upsamples the hidden features to the text-erased image with ViT blocks and patch splitting layers. As ViTEraser implicitly integrates text localization and inpainting, we propose a novel end-to-end pretraining method, termed SegMIM, which focuses the encoder and decoder on the text box segmentation and masked image modeling tasks, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that ViTEraser with SegMIM achieves state-of-the-art performance on STR by a substantial margin and exhibits strong generalization ability when extended to other tasks, \textit{e.g.}, tampered scene text detection. Furthermore, we comprehensively explore the architecture, pretraining, and scalability of the ViT-based encoder-decoder for STR, which provides deep insights into the application of ViT to the STR field. Code is available at https://github.com/shannanyinxiang/ViTEraser., Comment: AAAI 2024; Full Version

Text recognition in the wild is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Driven by end-to-end deep learning, recent studies suggest vision and language processing are effective for scene text recognition. Yet, solving edit errors such as add, delete, or replace is still the main challenge for existing approaches. In fact, the content of the text and its audio are naturally corresponding to each other, i.e., a single character error may result in a clear different pronunciation. In this paper, we propose the AudioOCR, a simple yet effective probabilistic audio decoder for mel spectrogram sequence prediction to guide the scene text recognition, which only participates in the training phase and brings no extra cost during the inference stage. The underlying principle of AudioOCR can be easily applied to the existing approaches. Experiments using 7 previous scene text recognition methods on 12 existing regular, irregular, and occluded benchmarks demonstrate our proposed method can bring consistent improvement. More importantly, through our experimentation, we show that AudioOCR possesses a generalizability that extends to more challenging scenarios, including recognizing non-English text, out-of-vocabulary words, and text with various accents. Code will be available at https://github.com/wenwenyu/AudioOCR.

Structured text extraction is one of the most valuable and challenging application directions in the field of Document AI. However, the scenarios of past benchmarks are limited, and the corresponding evaluation protocols usually focus on the submodules of the structured text extraction scheme. In order to eliminate these problems, we organized the ICDAR 2023 competition on Structured text extraction from Visually-Rich Document images (SVRD). We set up two tracks for SVRD including Track 1: HUST-CELL and Track 2: Baidu-FEST, where HUST-CELL aims to evaluate the end-to-end performance of Complex Entity Linking and Labeling, and Baidu-FEST focuses on evaluating the performance and generalization of Zero-shot / Few-shot Structured Text extraction from an end-to-end perspective. Compared to the current document benchmarks, our two tracks of competition benchmark enriches the scenarios greatly and contains more than 50 types of visually-rich document images (mainly from the actual enterprise applications). The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 24th March, 2023. There are 35 participants and 91 valid submissions received for Track 1, and 15 participants and 26 valid submissions received for Track 2. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, and submission summaries. According to the performance of the submissions, we believe there is still a large gap on the expected information extraction performance for complex and zero-shot scenarios. It is hoped that this competition will attract many researchers in the field of CV and NLP, and bring some new thoughts to the field of Document AI., Comment: ICDAR 2023 Competition on SVRD report (To be appear in ICDAR 2023)

Large models have recently played a dominant role in natural language processing and multimodal vision-language learning. However, their effectiveness in text-related visual tasks remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Large Multimodal Models, such as GPT4V and Gemini, in various text-related visual tasks including Text Recognition, Scene Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (VQA), Document-Oriented VQA, Key Information Extraction (KIE), and Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER). To facilitate the assessment of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities in Large Multimodal Models, we propose OCRBench, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark. OCRBench contains 29 datasets, making it the most comprehensive OCR evaluation benchmark available. Furthermore, our study reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of these models, particularly in handling multilingual text, handwritten text, non-semantic text, and mathematical expression recognition. Most importantly, the baseline results presented in this study could provide a foundational framework for the conception and assessment of innovative strategies targeted at enhancing zero-shot multimodal techniques. The evaluation pipeline and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/MultimodalOCR.

Based on the algebraic equation of motion (AEOM) method, we investigate the transport properties of a quantum dot. We obtain an analytical expression for the dot electron single-particle Green's function, and based on this expression, we plot the dot electron density of states under different biases. We find that the Kondo resonance splits and is suppressed as the bias is increased. In addition, we calculate the differential conductance of the dot and obtain the zero-bias Kondo resonance at different temperatures, which is found to be suppressed as the temperature is increased.

Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection (Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals, and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The competition attracted 53 participants from academia and industry including 28 submissions for Task 1 and 25 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR technology., Comment: ICDAR2023 Competition on ReST report (To be appear in ICDAR 2023)

The recent success of ChatGPT and GPT-4 has drawn widespread attention to multimodal dialogue systems. However, there is a lack of datasets in the academic community that can effectively evaluate the multimodal generation capabilities of Visual Language Models (VLMs) in textual-visual chat tasks. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing two novel multimodal datasets: the synthetic CLEVR-ATVC dataset (620K) and the manually pictured Fruit-ATVC dataset (50K). These datasets incorporate both visual and text-based inputs and outputs. Furthermore, to facilitate the accountability of multimodal systems in rejecting human requests, similar to language-based ChatGPT conversations, we introduce specific rules as supervisory signals within the datasets. This allows the trained VLM to provide a yes or no answer after engaging in visual and textual reasoning, accompanied by a language explanation to clarify the reasons behind the inability to execute the given human instruction. Our proposed method involves a two-stage training procedure, which includes training the image auto-encoder and the auto-regressive transformer from scratch. The first stage employs a discrete variational autoencoder (dVAE) to compress each image into concise tokens, which are then combined with text tokens into a single data stream. This stream is subsequently fed into the decoder-based transformer to generate visual re-creations and textual feedback in the second stage. We conduct comprehensive analyses of experimental results, focusing on re-created image quality, answer accuracy, and the model's behavior when faced with uncertainty and imperfect user queries. Through our explorations and findings, we aim to contribute valuable insights into the accountability of textual-visual generative models., Comment: TMLR, Survey Certification

The recent large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model has shown great potential in various downstream tasks via leveraging the pretrained vision and language knowledge. Scene text, which contains rich textual and visual information, has an inherent connection with a model like CLIP. Recently, pretraining approaches based on vision language models have made effective progresses in the field of text detection. In contrast to these works, this paper proposes a new method, termed TCM, focusing on Turning the CLIP Model directly for text detection without pretraining process. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed TCM as follows: (1) The underlying principle of our framework can be applied to improve existing scene text detector. (2) It facilitates the few-shot training capability of existing methods, e.g., by using 10% of labeled data, we significantly improve the performance of the baseline method with an average of 22% in terms of the F-measure on 4 benchmarks. (3) By turning the CLIP model into existing scene text detection methods, we further achieve promising domain adaptation ability. The code will be publicly released at https://github.com/wenwenyu/TCM., Comment: CVPR2023

In recent years, large-scale models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across various domains. However, training such models requires various techniques to address the problem of limited computing power and memory on devices such as GPUs. Some commonly used techniques include pipeline parallelism, tensor parallelism, and activation checkpointing. While existing works have focused on finding efficient distributed execution plans (Zheng et al. 2022) and activation checkpoint scheduling (Herrmann et al. 2019, Beaumont et al. 2021}, there has been no method proposed to optimize these two plans jointly. Moreover, ahead-of-time compilation relies heavily on accurate memory and computing overhead estimation, which is often time-consuming and misleading. Existing training systems and machine learning pipelines either physically execute each operand or estimate memory usage with a scaled input tensor. To address these challenges, we introduce a system that can jointly optimize distributed execution and gradient checkpointing plans. Additionally, we provide an easy-to-use symbolic profiler that generates memory and computing statistics for any PyTorch model with a minimal time cost. Our approach allows users to parallelize their model training on the given hardware with minimum code change based. The source code is publicly available at Colossal-AI GitHub or https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI

End-to-end scene text spotting has made significant progress due to its intrinsic synergy between text detection and recognition. Previous methods commonly regard manual annotations such as horizontal rectangles, rotated rectangles, quadrangles, and polygons as a prerequisite, which are much more expensive than using single-point. Our new framework, SPTS v2, allows us to train high-performing text-spotting models using a single-point annotation. SPTS v2 reserves the advantage of the auto-regressive Transformer with an Instance Assignment Decoder (IAD) through sequentially predicting the center points of all text instances inside the same predicting sequence, while with a Parallel Recognition Decoder (PRD) for text recognition in parallel, which significantly reduces the requirement of the length of the sequence. These two decoders share the same parameters and are interactively connected with a simple but effective information transmission process to pass the gradient and information. Comprehensive experiments on various existing benchmark datasets demonstrate the SPTS v2 can outperform previous state-of-the-art single-point text spotters with fewer parameters while achieving 19$\times$ faster inference speed. Within the context of our SPTS v2 framework, our experiments suggest a potential preference for single-point representation in scene text spotting when compared to other representations. Such an attempt provides a significant opportunity for scene text spotting applications beyond the realms of existing paradigms. Code is available at: https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/SPTSv2., Comment: Accepted for publication in TPAMI 2023. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2112.07917

Although online handwriting verification has made great progress recently, the verification performances are still far behind the real usage owing to the small scale of the datasets as well as the limited biometric mediums. Therefore, this paper proposes a new handwriting verification benchmark dataset named Multimodal Signature and Digit String (MSDS), which consists of two subsets: MSDS-ChS (Chinese Signatures) and MSDS-TDS (Token Digit Strings), contributed by 402 users, with 20 genuine samples and 20 skilled forgeries per user per subset. MSDS-ChS consists of handwritten Chinese signatures, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the largest publicly available Chinese signature dataset for handwriting verification, at least eight times larger than existing online datasets. Meanwhile, MSDS-TDS consists of handwritten Token Digit Strings, i.e, the actual phone numbers of users, which have not been explored yet. Extensive experiments with different baselines are respectively conducted for MSDS-ChS and MSDS-TDS. Surprisingly, verification performances of state-of-the-art methods on MSDS-TDS are generally better than those on MSDS-ChS, which indicates that the handwritten Token Digit String could be a more effective biometric than handwritten Chinese signature. This is a promising discovery that could inspire us to explore new biometric traits. The MSDS dataset is available at https://github.com/HCIILAB/MSDS.

We introduce point affiliation into feature upsampling, a notion that describes the affiliation of each upsampled point to a semantic cluster formed by local decoder feature points with semantic similarity. By rethinking point affiliation, we present a generic formulation for generating upsampling kernels. The kernels encourage not only semantic smoothness but also boundary sharpness in the upsampled feature maps. Such properties are particularly useful for some dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. The key idea of our formulation is to generate similarity-aware kernels by comparing the similarity between each encoder feature point and the spatially associated local region of decoder features. In this way, the encoder feature point can function as a cue to inform the semantic cluster of upsampled feature points. To embody the formulation, we further instantiate a lightweight upsampling operator, termed Similarity-Aware Point Affiliation (SAPA), and investigate its variants. SAPA invites consistent performance improvements on a number of dense prediction tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and image matting. Code is available at: https://github.com/poppinace/sapa, Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2022. Code is available at https://github.com/poppinace/sapa

Handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR) has been an active research topic for decades. However, most previous studies solely focus on the recognition of cropped text line images, ignoring the error caused by text line detection in real-world applications. Although some approaches aimed at page-level text recognition have been proposed in recent years, they either are limited to simple layouts or require very detailed annotations including expensive line-level and even character-level bounding boxes. To this end, we propose PageNet for end-to-end weakly supervised page-level HCTR. PageNet detects and recognizes characters and predicts the reading order between them, which is more robust and flexible when dealing with complex layouts including multi-directional and curved text lines. Utilizing the proposed weakly supervised learning framework, PageNet requires only transcripts to be annotated for real data; however, it can still output detection and recognition results at both the character and line levels, avoiding the labor and cost of labeling bounding boxes of characters and text lines. Extensive experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate the superiority of PageNet over existing weakly supervised and fully supervised page-level methods. These experimental results may spark further research beyond the realms of existing methods based on connectionist temporal classification or attention. The source code is available at https://github.com/shannanyinxiang/PageNet., Comment: Accepted to appear in International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)

Text removal has attracted increasingly attention due to its various applications on privacy protection, document restoration, and text editing. It has shown significant progress with deep neural network. However, most of the existing methods often generate inconsistent results for complex background. To address this issue, we propose a Contextual-guided Text Removal Network, termed as CTRNet. CTRNet explores both low-level structure and high-level discriminative context feature as prior knowledge to guide the process of background restoration. We further propose a Local-global Content Modeling (LGCM) block with CNNs and Transformer-Encoder to capture local features and establish the long-term relationship among pixels globally. Finally, we incorporate LGCM with context guidance for feature modeling and decoding. Experiments on benchmark datasets, SCUT-EnsText and SCUT-Syn show that CTRNet significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, a qualitative experiment on examination papers also demonstrates the generalization ability of our method. The codes and supplement materials are available at https://github.com/lcy0604/CTRNet.

Multipartite entanglement plays an important role in quantum information processing and quantum metrology. Here, the dressing-energy-level-cascaded (DELC) four-wave mixing (FWM) processes are proposed to generate all-optical controlled multipartite entanglement within a single device. The entanglement characteristics of the produced states of light are characterized by applying the Duan criterion and the positivity under partial transposition criterion. Moreover, by using an internal dressing field to modulate atomic coherence, multiple quantum coherent channels of FWM are simultaneously constructed, which result in a great extension of entanglement mode number and quantum information capacity. We find that the violation of the entanglement criteria inequalities is coherent-channel dependent, and the produced states can be directly modulated via atomic coherence. Our system can integrate the generation and modulation of the entangled states in one process. It may help provide a compact method for realizing large scale quantum networks., Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures

The further development of deep neural networks is hampered by the limited GPU memory resource. Therefore, the optimization of GPU memory resources is highly demanded. Swapping and recomputation are commonly applied to make better use of GPU memory in deep learning. However, as an emerging domain, several challenges remain:1)The efficiency of recomputation is limited for both static and dynamic methods. 2)Swapping requires offloading parameters manually, which incurs a great time cost. 3) There is no such dynamic and fine-grained method that involves tensor swapping together with tensor recomputation nowadays. To remedy the above issues, we propose a novel scheduler manager named DELTA(Dynamic tEnsor offLoad and recompuTAtion). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to make a reasonable dynamic runtime scheduler on the combination of tensor swapping and tensor recomputation without user oversight. In DELTA, we propose a filter algorithm to select the optimal tensors to be released out of GPU memory and present a director algorithm to select a proper action for each of these tensors. Furthermore, prefetching and overlapping are deliberately considered to overcome the time cost caused by swapping and recomputing tensors. Experimental results show that DELTA not only saves 40%-70% of GPU memory, surpassing the state-of-the-art method to a great extent but also gets comparable convergence results as the baseline with acceptable time delay. Also, DELTA gains 2.04$\times$ maximum batchsize when training ResNet-50 and 2.25$\times$ when training ResNet-101 compared with the baseline. Besides, comparisons between the swapping cost and recomputation cost in our experiments demonstrate the importance of making a reasonable dynamic scheduler on tensor swapping and tensor recomputation, which refutes the arguments in some related work that swapping should be the first and best choice., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures

End-to-end scene text spotting has attracted great attention in recent years due to the success of excavating the intrinsic synergy of the scene text detection and recognition. However, recent state-of-the-art methods usually incorporate detection and recognition simply by sharing the backbone, which does not directly take advantage of the feature interaction between the two tasks. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end scene text spotting framework termed SwinTextSpotter. Using a transformer encoder with dynamic head as the detector, we unify the two tasks with a novel Recognition Conversion mechanism to explicitly guide text localization through recognition loss. The straightforward design results in a concise framework that requires neither additional rectification module nor character-level annotation for the arbitrarily-shaped text. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on multi-oriented datasets RoIC13 and ICDAR 2015, arbitrarily-shaped datasets Total-Text and CTW1500, and multi-lingual datasets ReCTS (Chinese) and VinText (Vietnamese) demonstrate SwinTextSpotter significantly outperforms existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mxin262/SwinTextSpotter., Comment: Accepted to be appeared in CVPR 2022