# IPAD: Iterative, Parallel, and Diffusion-based Network for Scene Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11923/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 84 of its 122 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05379/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02281/) (2017)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [A Survey on Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10875/) (2025)
- [Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21682/) (2025)
- [Towards Real-World Document Parsing via Realistic Scene Synthesis and Document-Aware Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23885/) (2026)
- [StyleTextGen: Style-Conditioned Multilingual Scene Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14708/) (2026)
- [NAMER: Non-Autoregressive Modeling for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11380/) (2024)
- [Class-Agnostic Region-of-Interest Matching in Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21055/) (2025)
- [What Is Wrong with Synthetic Data for Scene Text Recognition? A Strong Synthetic Engine with Diverse Simulations and Self-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06450/) (2026)
- [All-in-One Multilingual Scene Text Recognition with Script-aware Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24058/) (2026)
- [TADoc: Robust Time-Aware Document Image Dewarping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06988/) (2025)
- [RGB-Event HyperGraph Prompt for Kilometer Marker Recognition based on Pre-trained Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22026/) (2026)
- [Masked Next-Scale Prediction for Self-supervised Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14885/) (2026)
- [Embedding Rotation Invariance for Provable Multi-Oriented Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10684/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Nowadays, scene text recognition has attracted more and more attention due to its diverse applications. Most state-of-the-art methods adopt an encoder-decoder framework with the attention mechanism, autoregressively generating text from left to right. Despite the convincing performance, this sequential decoding strategy constrains the inference speed. Conversely, non-autoregressive models provide faster, simultaneous predictions but often sacrifice accuracy. Although utilizing an explicit language model can improve performance, it burdens the computational load. Besides, separating linguistic knowledge from vision information may harm the final prediction. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution that uses a parallel and iterative decoder that adopts an easy-first decoding strategy. Furthermore, we regard text recognition as an image-based conditional text generation task and utilize the discrete diffusion strategy, ensuring exhaustive exploration of bidirectional contextual information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior results on the benchmark datasets, including both Chinese and English text images.