# GlotOCR Bench: OCR Models Still Struggle Beyond a Handful of Unicode Scripts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12978 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12978/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Document understanding and multimodal RAG, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 20 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Document understanding and multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/document-understanding-and-multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07895/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [OCRBench v2: An Improved Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Visual Text Localization and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00321/) (2024)
- [OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07626/) (2024)
- [FineWeb2: One Pipeline to Scale Them All -- Adapting Pre-Training Data Processing to Every Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20920/) (2025)
- [olmOCR: Unlocking Trillions of Tokens in PDFs with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18443/) (2025)
- [MonkeyOCR: Document Parsing with a Structure-Recognition-Relation Triplet Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05218/) (2025)
- [CC-OCR: A Comprehensive and Challenging OCR Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Literacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02210/) (2024)
- [PaddleOCR-VL-1.5: Towards a Multi-Task 0.9B VLM for Robust In-the-Wild Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21957/) (2026)
- [olmOCR 2: Unit Test Rewards for Document OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19817/) (2025)
- [SynthTIGER: Synthetic Text Image GEneratoR Towards Better Text Recognition Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09313/) (2021)
- [GlotLID: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16248/) (2023)
- [LightOnOCR: A 1B End-to-End Multilingual Vision-Language Model for State-of-the-Art OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14251/) (2026)
- [GlotCC: An Open Broad-Coverage CommonCrawl Corpus and Pipeline for Minority Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23825/) (2024)
- [GlotScript: A Resource and Tool for Low Resource Writing System Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13320/) (2023)
- [KITAB-Bench: A Comprehensive Multi-Domain Benchmark for Arabic OCR and Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14949/) (2025)
- [Multimodal LLMs for OCR, OCR Post-Correction, and Named Entity Recognition in Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00414/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Multimodal Language Models as Visual Assistants for Visually Impaired Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22610/) (2025)
- [Reasoning-OCR: Can Large Multimodal Models Solve Complex Logical Reasoning Problems from OCR Cues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12766/) (2025)
- [synthocr-gen: A synthetic ocr dataset generator for low-resource languages- breaking the data barrier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16113/) (2026)

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

- [Reading or Guessing? Visual Grounding Failures of Vision-Language Models for OCR in Ancient Greek Editions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27750/) (2026)
- [Multi-Expert Routing for Multi-Domain Low-Resource OCR: A Manchu Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14041/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optical character recognition (OCR) has advanced rapidly with the rise of vision-language models, yet evaluation has remained concentrated on a small cluster of high- and mid-resource scripts. We introduce GlotOCR Bench, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating OCR generalization across 100+ Unicode scripts. Our benchmark comprises clean and degraded image variants rendered from real multilingual texts. Images are rendered using fonts from the Google Fonts repository, shaped with HarfBuzz and rasterized with FreeType, supporting both LTR and RTL scripts. Samples of rendered images were manually reviewed to verify correct rendering across all scripts. We evaluate a broad suite of open-weight and proprietary vision-language models and find that most perform well on fewer than ten scripts, and even the strongest frontier models fail to generalize beyond thirty scripts. Performance broadly tracks script-level pretraining coverage, suggesting that current OCR systems rely on language model pretraining as much as on visual recognition. Models confronted with unfamiliar scripts either produce random noise or hallucinate characters from similar scripts they already know. We release the benchmark and pipeline for reproducibility. Pipeline Code: https://github.com/cisnlp/glotocr-bench, Benchmark: https://hf.co/datasets/cis-lmu/glotocr-bench.