# Zero-Shot Chinese Character Recognition with Stroke-Level Decomposition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11613 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11613/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Online and Offline Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition: A Comprehensive Study and New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05763/) (2016)
- [High Performance Offline Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition Using GoogLeNet and Directional Feature Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04925/) (2015)
- [Template-Instance Loss for Offline Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05545/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Benchmarking Chinese Text Recognition: Datasets, Baselines, and an Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15093/) (2021)
- [Text Gestalt: Stroke-Aware Scene Text Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08171/) (2021)
- [Chinese Text Recognition with A Pre-Trained CLIP-Like Model Through Image-IDS Aligning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01083/) (2023)
- [Towards Open-Set Text Recognition via Label-to-Prototype Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05179/) (2022)
- [RZCR: Zero-shot Character Recognition via Radical-based Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05842/) (2022)
- [Chinese Character Recognition with Radical-Structured Stroke Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13518/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Generation of Training Data with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15660/) (2023)
- [Toward Zero-shot Character Recognition: A Gold Standard Dataset with Radical-level Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00655/) (2023)
- [Open-set Text Recognition via Character-Context Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05535/) (2022)
- [HierCode: A Lightweight Hierarchical Codebook for Zero-shot Chinese Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13761/) (2024)
- [STAR: Zero-Shot Chinese Character Recognition with Stroke- and Radical-Level Decompositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08490/) (2022)
- [FreeText: Training-Free Text Rendering in Diffusion Transformers via Attention Localization and Spectral Glyph Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00535/) (2026)
- [Stroke-Based Autoencoders: Self-Supervised Learners for Efficient Zero-Shot Chinese Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08191/) (2022)
- [Orientation-Independent Chinese Text Recognition in Scene Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01081/) (2023)
- [MegaHan97K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Mega-Category Chinese Character Recognition with over 97K Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04807/) (2025)
- [Improving Chinese Character Representation with Formation Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12693/) (2024)
- [CoLa: Chinese Character Decomposition with Compositional Latent Components](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03798/) (2025)
- [Character decomposition to resolve class imbalance problem in Hangul OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06079/) (2022)
- [Count, Decode and Fetch: A New Approach to Handwritten Chinese Character Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16253/) (2023)
- [SAN: Structure-Aware Network for Complex and Long-tailed Chinese Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06381/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Chinese Character Recognition with Hierarchical Multi-Granularity Image-Text Aligning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24837/) (2025)
- [Reading Chinese in Natural Scenes with a Bag-of-Radicals Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02576/) (2022)
- [DNA: Dual-branch Network with Adaptation for Open-Set Online Handwriting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22064/) (2025)
- [Entropy-Aware Structural Alignment for Zero-Shot Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03913/) (2026)
- [Logographic Character Visual Pretraining via Semantic-based Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00096/) (2026)
- [Decompose Radicals, Then Reward: Fine-Grained Inspection for Accurate Chinese Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37569/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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. Previous character-based and radical-based methods have not fundamentally addressed the zero-shot problem since some characters or radicals in test sets may not appear in training sets under a data-hungry condition. Inspired by the fact that humans can generalize to know how to write characters unseen before if they have learned stroke orders of some characters, we propose a stroke-based method by decomposing each character into a sequence of strokes, which are the most basic units of Chinese characters. However, we observe that there is a one-to-many relationship between stroke sequences and Chinese characters. To tackle this challenge, we employ a matching-based strategy to transform the predicted stroke sequence to a specific character. We evaluate the proposed method on handwritten characters, printed artistic characters, and scene characters. The experimental results validate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods on both character zero-shot and radical zero-shot tasks. Moreover, the proposed method can be easily generalized to other languages whose characters can be decomposed into strokes.