Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.03595

How Far Can Synthetic Data Take Thai OCR?

Kunat Pipatanakul
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We investigate what makes synthetic OCR supervision transfer to real Thai documents and use the resulting insights to build Wayu-Paxa-OCR-Zero, a Thai OCR model adapted without OCR labels from real Thai document pages. Synthetic data provide exact labels at scale, but "realism" conflates source domain, page context, typography, spatial structure, and glyph variation. We disentangle these factors with a controlled document-reconstruction pipeline and evaluate each variant under page- and crop-level training on printed and handwritten Thai documents. Non-text context has little consistent effect, whereas typeface diversity, two-dimensional structure, and real handwriting glyphs improve transfer; moreover, source-domain matching depends on training granularity, with in-domain reconstruction approaching real printed supervision under page-level training (1.82% versus 1.31% median character error rate) but underperforming out-of-domain reconstruction under crop-level training (15.59% versus 5.52%). Guided by these findings, we adapt the 0.9B-parameter PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 into Wayu-Paxa-OCR-Zero using 45,723 synthetic pages: relative to its base checkpoint, it reduces median character error rate from 6.64% to 1.24% on printed pages and from 74.87% to 20.55% on handwriting and outperforms Typhoon OCR v1 7B on all five evaluation sets, showing that synthetic-only training can be competitive.

Explore related subjects

cs.CLcs.AIcs.CV

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Kunat Pipatanakul. 2026-09-03. How Far Can Synthetic Data Take Thai OCR?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03595

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

Discover connections

cs.AI subjectcs.CL subjectcs.CV subject

Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Visual Framing for News Stance Detection via Image Generation

Article-level news stance detection aims to identify the perspective of news articles toward social issues. Despite advances in stance detection and its importance for trustworthy media environments, news articles pose distinct challenges because their stances are often implicit, subtly conveyed through journalistic framing, and embedded in long, structurally complex texts. To address these challenges, we introduce VFStance, which leverages visual framing to make implicit stance cues more explicit via image generation. In evaluation experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of VFStance over existing methods and the contribution of visual framing to its performance. Finally, a controlled user study (N=200) in a snippet-based news consumption setting further demonstrates that VFStance can make stance signals visually salient and highlights its potential use beyond automated stance detection.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

PetQA: Benchmarking Veterinary Knowledge and Clinical Reasoning

We introduce PetQA, a Korean long-form question-answering (QA) benchmark for evaluating veterinary knowledge and clinical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs). PetQA contains 10,076 text-only and 8,751 multimodal QA pairs derived from real-world questions about dogs and cats, paired with answers from expert veterinarians. Its test split, PetQA-Bench, further includes annotations for question types and clinical conditions. We evaluate eighteen models using ROUGE, BERTScore, and LLM-as-a-judge metrics for factuality and helpfulness under three settings: zero-shot inference, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The benchmarking results provide an overview of the strengths and limitations of current models in addressing veterinary clinical queries and highlight the need for more effective adaptation methods to develop clinically reliable AI systems for veterinary care. To facilitate broader use, we additionally provide translated versions of PetQA-Bench in five languages.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

LookBack: Where and How to Score LVLM Responses via Visual Reference Usage

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) integrate visual perception with language generation, enabling responses that span image understanding and complex reasoning. However, LVLMs do not just inherit the text-level hallucinations; they also hallucinate against the image, producing fluent responses ungrounded in what they see. This makes LVLM response scoring inherently harder, and our diagnostics show that existing confidence-based metrics adopted from LLMs are insufficient for LVLMs. Specifically, removing the input image barely changes confidence-based selection, suggesting that output-space confidence primarily captures textual plausibility rather than agreement with the image. To address this gap, we propose LookBack, a training-free LVLM response scoring method that augments token likelihood with visual lookback score, a lightweight measure of how strongly each response token refers to image tokens. Across four benchmarks and three models, LookBack consistently improves Best-of-$N$ selection over existing baselines with negligible additional overhead.

cs.CV↗