mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Deciphering Oracle Bone Language with Diffusion Models

arXiv 2406.00684 ↗First posted 2 Jun 2024cs.CV cs.CLcited by 18

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Abstract (arXiv)

Originating from China's Shang Dynasty approximately 3,000 years ago, the Oracle Bone Script (OBS) is a cornerstone in the annals of linguistic history, predating many established writing systems. Despite the discovery of thousands of inscriptions, a vast expanse of OBS remains undeciphered, casting a veil of mystery over this ancient language. The emergence of modern AI technologies presents a novel frontier for OBS decipherment, challenging traditional NLP methods that rely heavily on large textual corpora, a luxury not afforded by historical languages. This paper introduces a novel approach by adopting image generation techniques, specifically through the development of Oracle Bone Script Decipher (OBSD). Utilizing a conditional diffusion-based strategy, OBSD generates vital clues for decipherment, charting a new course for AI-assisted analysis of ancient languages. To validate its efficacy, extensive experiments were conducted on an oracle bone script dataset, with quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness of OBSD. Code and decipherment results will be made available at https://github.com/guanhaisu/OBSD.

Key facts. Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 13 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2024.

Builds on

13 of 34 references.

References · 13

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  11. 2023FontDiffuser: One-Shot Font Generation via Denoising Diffusion with Multi-Scale Content Aggregation and Style Contrastive Learningcited by 48
  12. 2022Unsupervised Structure-Texture Separation Network for Oracle Character Recognitioncited by 15
1 more
  1. 2024An open dataset for the evolution of oracle bone characters: EVOBCcited by 15

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 4; 2025: 6; 2026: 8.

18 papers.

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  1. 2024Opportunities and Challenges of Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages in Humanities Researchcited by 26
  2. 2024OBI-Bench: Can LMMs Aid in Study of Ancient Script on Oracle Bones?cited by 22
  3. 2025OracleFusion: Assisting the Decipherment of Oracle Bone Script with Structurally Constrained Semantic Typographycited by 8
  4. 2025Mitigating Long-tail Distribution in Oracle Bone Inscriptions: Dataset, Model, and Benchmarkcited by 5
  5. 2025Reasoning Over the Glyphs: Evaluation of LLM's Decipherment of Rare Scriptscited by 4
  6. 2025PictOBI-20k: Unveiling Large Multimodal Models in Visual Decipherment for Pictographic Oracle Bone Characterscited by 4
  7. 2025Interpretable Oracle Bone Script Decipherment through Radical and Pictographic Analysis with LVLMscited by 3
  8. 2024Oracle Bone Script Similiar Character Screening Approach Based on Simsiam Contrastive Learning and Supervised Learningcited by 1
  9. 2024A Cross-Font Image Retrieval Network for Recognizing Undeciphered Oracle Bone Inscriptionscited by 1
  10. 2025InteChar: A Unified Oracle Bone Character List for Ancient Chinese Language Modelingcited by 1
  11. 2026Specializing Large Models for Oracle Bone Script Interpretation via Component-Grounded Multimodal Knowledge Augmentationcited by 1
  12. 2026Enhancing Multimodal Large Language Models for Ancient Chinese Character Evolution Analysis via Glyph-Driven Fine-Tuningcited by 1
6 more
  1. 2026Enabling Stroke-Level Structural Analysis of Hieroglyphic Scripts without Language-Specific Priorscited by 0
  2. 2026Towards Computational Chinese Paleographycited by 0
  3. 2026How Do We Engage with Other Disciplines? A Framework to Study Meaningful Interdisciplinary Discourse in Scholarly Publicationscited by 0
  4. 2026OracleAnalyser: Analysing Implicit Semantics of Oracle Bone Scripts through MLLMs with Post-trainingcited by 0
  5. 2026AlphaOracle: Oracle bone script decipherment via human-workflow-inspired deep learningcited by 0
  6. 2026FROD: Feature Matching Residual Denoising Oracle Bone Deciphercited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2023Diff-Oracle: Deciphering Oracle Bone Scripts with Controllable Diffusion Model
  2. 2025OracleAgent: A Multimodal Reasoning Agent for Oracle Bone Script Research
  3. 2026Beyond Single Character: Evaluating MLLMs for Sentence-Level Oracle Bone Inscription Understanding
  4. 2024OracleSage: Towards Unified Visual-Linguistic Understanding of Oracle Bone Scripts through Cross-Modal Knowledge Fusion
  5. 2026Ancient-Bench: A Comprehensive Multi-millennial, Multi-medium, and Multi-script Benchmark for Ancient Chinese Artifact Text Recognition
  6. 2025Finetuning Vision-Language Models as OCR Systems for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study of Manchu
  7. 2025Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Chinese Ancient Documents: From OCR to Knowledge Reasoning
  8. 2026Stoicheia: Character-Level Masked Diffusion for Ancient Greek Textual Restoration, Parsing, and Metrical Scansion