# CoSMo: A Multimodal Transformer for Page Stream Segmentation in Comic Books

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10053/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [The Amazing Mysteries of the Gutter: Drawing Inferences Between Panels in Comic Book Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05118/) (2016)
- [The Manga Whisperer: Automatically Generating Transcriptions for Comics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10224/) (2024)
- [CoMix: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Task Comic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03550/) (2024)
- [Tails Tell Tales: Chapter-Wide Manga Transcriptions with Character Names](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00298/) (2024)
- [One missing piece in Vision and Language: A Survey on Comics Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09502/) (2024)
- [Comics Datasets Framework: Mix of Comics datasets for detection benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03540/) (2024)
- [Page Stream Segmentation with Convolutional Neural Nets Combining Textual and Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03006/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Comics Text-Cloze](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03719/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Page Stream Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11981/) (2024)
- [Semantic Parsing of Interpage Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13530/) (2022)

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

- [Khondo: A Multimodal Benchmark for Document Packet Splitting of Bangla Forms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21780/) (2026)
- [Splitting Documents at Lower Cost: Multi-Split Boundary Decisions for LLM-Based Page Stream Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22620/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces CoSMo, a novel multimodal Transformer for Page Stream Segmentation (PSS) in comic books, a critical task for automated content understanding, as it is a necessary first stage for many downstream tasks like character analysis, story indexing, or metadata enrichment. We formalize PSS for this unique medium and curate a new 20,800-page annotated dataset. CoSMo, developed in vision-only and multimodal variants, consistently outperforms traditional baselines and significantly larger general-purpose vision-language models across F1-Macro, Panoptic Quality, and stream-level metrics. Our findings highlight the dominance of visual features for comic PSS macro-structure, yet demonstrate multimodal benefits in resolving challenging ambiguities. CoSMo establishes a new state-of-the-art, paving the way for scalable comic book analysis.