# Writer adaptation for offline text recognition: An exploration of neural network-based methods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [Meta-Learning with Latent Embedding Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05960/) (2018)
- [Meta-SGD: Learning to Learn Quickly for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09835/) (2017)
- [Rapid Learning or Feature Reuse? Towards Understanding the Effectiveness of MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09157/) (2019)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [How to train your MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09502/) (2018)
- [TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10282/) (2021)
- [Modulating early visual processing by language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00683/) (2017)
- [A review of domain adaptation without target labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05335/) (2019)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [learn2learn: A Library for Meta-Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12284/) (2020)
- [Meta-Learning via Learned Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05374/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Handwritten Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07377/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Text Line Recognition Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07787/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [On the Generalization of Handwritten Text Recognition Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17332/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Synthetic-to-Real Handwritten Text Recognition via Task Analogies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09713/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Handwriting recognition has seen significant success with the use of deep learning. However, a persistent shortcoming of neural networks is that they are not well-equipped to deal with shifting data distributions. In the field of handwritten text recognition (HTR), this shows itself in poor recognition accuracy for writers that are not similar to those seen during training. An ideal HTR model should be adaptive to new writing styles in order to handle the vast amount of possible writing styles. In this paper, we explore how HTR models can be made writer adaptive by using only a handful of examples from a new writer (e.g., 16 examples) for adaptation. Two HTR architectures are used as base models, using a ResNet backbone along with either an LSTM or Transformer sequence decoder. Using these base models, two methods are considered to make them writer adaptive: 1) model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), an algorithm commonly used for tasks such as few-shot classification, and 2) writer codes, an idea originating from automatic speech recognition. Results show that an HTR-specific version of MAML known as MetaHTR improves performance compared to the baseline with a 1.4 to 2.0 improvement in word error rate (WER). The improvement due to writer adaptation is between 0.2 and 0.7 WER, where a deeper model seems to lend itself better to adaptation using MetaHTR than a shallower model. However, applying MetaHTR to larger HTR models or sentence-level HTR may become prohibitive due to its high computational and memory requirements. Lastly, writer codes based on learned features or Hinge statistical features did not lead to improved recognition performance.