# Relational Contrastive Learning for Scene Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00508 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00508/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning via Invariant Causal Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07922/) (2020)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01906/) (2019)
- [Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition with Semantic Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12294/) (2020)
- [Robust Scene Text Recognition with Automatic Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03915/) (2016)
- [SEED: Semantics Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10977/) (2020)
- [Focusing Attention: Towards Accurate Text Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02054/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning with Stronger Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07713/) (2021)
- [From Two to One: A New Scene Text Recognizer with Visual Language Modeling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09661/) (2021)
- [ReSSL: Relational Self-Supervised Learning with Weak Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09282/) (2021)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Contrastive Learning for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10873/) (2020)
- [What If We Only Use Real Datasets for Scene Text Recognition? Toward Scene Text Recognition With Fewer Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04400/) (2021)
- [On Recognizing Texts of Arbitrary Shapes with 2D Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04396/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Chinese Text Recognition: Datasets, Baselines, and an Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15093/) (2021)
- [Reading and Writing: Discriminative and Generative Modeling for Self-Supervised Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00193/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [VL-Reader: Vision and Language Reconstructor is an Effective Scene Text Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11656/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Text Recognition: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19889/) (2024)
- [Deformable Attentive Visual Enhancement for Referring Segmentation Using Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19242/) (2025)
- [Relaxed syntax modeling in Transformers for future-proof license plate recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17051/) (2025)
- [LEGO: Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Scene Text Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02036/) (2024)
- [Relational Contrastive Learning and Masked Image Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11219/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Context-aware methods achieved great success in supervised scene text recognition via incorporating semantic priors from words. We argue that such prior contextual information can be interpreted as the relations of textual primitives due to the heterogeneous text and background, which can provide effective self-supervised labels for representation learning. However, textual relations are restricted to the finite size of dataset due to lexical dependencies, which causes the problem of over-fitting and compromises representation robustness. To this end, we propose to enrich the textual relations via rearrangement, hierarchy and interaction, and design a unified framework called RCLSTR: Relational Contrastive Learning for Scene Text Recognition. Based on causality, we theoretically explain that three modules suppress the bias caused by the contextual prior and thus guarantee representation robustness. Experiments on representation quality show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised STR methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ThunderVVV/RCLSTR.