mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Chinese Ancient Documents: From OCR to Knowledge Reasoning

arXiv 2509.09731 ↗First posted 10 Sep 2025cs.CLcited by 19

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

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Abstract (arXiv)

Chinese ancient documents, invaluable carriers of millennia of Chinese history and culture, hold rich knowledge across diverse fields but face challenges in digitization and understanding, i.e., traditional methods only scan images, while current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with their visual and linguistic complexity. Existing document benchmarks focus on English printed texts or simplified Chinese, leaving a gap for evaluating VLMs on ancient Chinese documents. To address this, we present AncientDoc, the first benchmark for Chinese ancient documents, designed to assess VLMs from OCR to knowledge reasoning. AncientDoc includes five tasks (page-level OCR, vernacular translation, reasoning-based QA, knowledge-based QA, linguistic variant QA) and covers 14 document types, over 100 books, and about 3,000 pages. Based on AncientDoc, we evaluate mainstream VLMs using multiple metrics, supplemented by a human-aligned large language model for scoring.

Key facts. Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 17 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2025.

Builds on

17 of 39 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling6 Dec

Other references · 16

  1. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  2. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,512
  3. 2024Qwen2.5 Technical Reportcited by 4,942
  4. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  5. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  6. 2024LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfercited by 2,719
  7. 2023Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyondcited by 2,224
  8. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,834
  9. 2025Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Reportcited by 736
  10. 2024DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understandingcited by 572
  11. 2025Seed1.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 373
  12. 2024OCRBench v2: An Improved Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Visual Text Localization and Reasoningcited by 173
4 more
  1. 2023Document-Level Machine Translation with Large Language Modelscited by 90
  2. 2018Improving the Transformer Translation Model with Document-Level Contextcited by 74
  3. 2017Scene Text Recognition with Sliding Convolutional Character Modelscited by 7
  4. 2024PDF-MVQA: A Dataset for Multimodal Information Retrieval in PDF-based Visual Question Answeringcited by 7

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 18.

19 papers.

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  1. 2025CME-CAD: Heterogeneous Collaborative Multi-Expert Reinforcement Learning for CAD Code Generationcited by 19
  2. 2026Cognitive Mismatch in Multimodal Large Language Models for Discrete Symbol Understandingcited by 7
  3. 2026LPCAN: Lightweight Pyramid Cross-Attention Network for Rail Surface Defect Detection Using RGB-D Datacited by 0
  4. 2026Knowledge-Embedded and Hypernetwork-Guided Few-Shot Substation Meter Defect Image Generation Methodcited by 0
  5. 2026MA-LipNet: Multi-Dimensional Attention Networks for Robust Lipreadingcited by 0
  6. 2026The Diffusion Duet: Harmonizing Dual Channels with Wavelet Suppression for Image Separationcited by 0
  7. 2026Detecting Deepfakes with Multivariate Soft Blending and CLIP-based Image-Text Alignmentcited by 0
  8. 2026Efficient Image Super-Resolution with Multi-Scale Spatial Adaptive Attention Networkscited by 0
  9. 2026A Deformable Attention-Based Detection Transformer with Cross-Scale Feature Fusion for Industrial Coil Spring Inspectioncited by 0
  10. 2026Transmittance-Guided Structure-Texture Decomposition for Nighttime Image Dehazingcited by 0
  11. 2026Hierarchical Awareness Adapters with Hybrid Pyramid Feature Fusion for Dense Depth Predictioncited by 0
  12. 2026Do You Need Text Rectification? Soft Attention Mask Embedding for Rectification-Free Scene Text Spottingcited by 0
7 more
  1. 2026CulMind: Benchmarking Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning in Chinese Cultural Heritagecited by 0
  2. 2026Cross-Temporal Sinhala OCR: Page-Level Adaptation and Diachronic Analysiscited by 0
  3. 2026HCSU: A Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Historical Calligraphy Style Understandingcited by 0
  4. 2026SAGE: From Direct Answering to Evidence-Grounded Inference for Chinese Ancient Document Understandingcited by 0
  5. 2026Rank-Consistent Set Reasoning for Co-Salient Object Detectioncited by 0
  6. 2026Contour-Guided Spectral Routing for Robust Real-Time Pedestrian Detectioncited by 0
  7. 2026LongHisDoc: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Chinese Long Historical Document Understandingcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Ancient-Bench: A Comprehensive Multi-millennial, Multi-medium, and Multi-script Benchmark for Ancient Chinese Artifact Text Recognition
  2. 2026JieZi: A Large-Scale Expert-Audited Dataset and Benchmark for Ancient Chinese Character Exegesis
  3. 2025Finetuning Vision-Language Models as OCR Systems for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study of Manchu
  4. 2026Towards Computational Chinese Paleography
  5. 2025PictOBI-20k: Unveiling Large Multimodal Models in Visual Decipherment for Pictographic Oracle Bone Characters
  6. 2024AC-EVAL: Evaluating Ancient Chinese Language Understanding in Large Language Models
  7. 2026TongGuOCR: A Layout-Aware and Token-Augmented OCR MLLM for Chinese Historical Documents
  8. 2026Combining Synthetic and Real Data for Low-Resource Historical OCR: A Manchu Case Study