# All-in-One Multilingual Scene Text Recognition with Script-aware Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24058 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24058/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal MoE models, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 45 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Multimodal MoE models](https://mlsanity.com/moe/multimodal-moe-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)
- [Scaling Vision with Sparse Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05974/) (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)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10282/) (2021)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18234/) (2025)
- [General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01704/) (2024)
- [Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15804/) (2026)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [PaddleOCR 3.0 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05595/) (2025)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition -- RRC-MLT-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00945/) (2019)
- [SEED: Semantics Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10977/) (2020)
- [MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22186/) (2025)
- [KOSMOS-2.5: A Multimodal Literate Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11419/) (2023)
- [SVTR: Scene Text Recognition with a Single Visual Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00159/) (2022)
- [CC-OCR: A Comprehensive and Challenging OCR Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Literacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02210/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-OCR 2: Visual Causal Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20552/) (2026)
- [NRTR: A No-Recurrence Sequence-to-Sequence Model For Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00926/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Chinese Text Recognition: Datasets, Baselines, and an Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15093/) (2021)
- [dots.ocr: Multilingual Document Layout Parsing in a Single Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02498/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Scene Text Recognition: A Data Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08723/) (2023)
- [CDistNet: Perceiving Multi-Domain Character Distance for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11011/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Character-to-Character Distillation for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00288/) (2022)
- [GLM-OCR Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10910/) (2026)
- [SVTRv2: CTC Beats Encoder-Decoder Models in Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15858/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Decompose Radicals, Then Reward: Fine-Grained Inspection for Accurate Chinese Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37569/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multilingual scene text recognition (STR) remains challenging due to the scarcity of training data for most languages and the difficulty of serving diverse scripts within a single model. Existing solutions either deploy one recognizer per language, inflating cost and introducing error accumulation, or rely on massive vision-language models (VLMs) that are expensive and still inaccurate on many scripts. In this work, we pursue an all-in-one multilingual recognizer that is simpler than per-language experts, lighter than VLMs, and more accurate than both. First, we construct TextMuSS-10M, a large-scale synthetic scene text dataset spanning 10 scripts and 229 languages. It provides balanced and sufficient supervision where real data is unavailable. Second, we propose ScriptMoE, a script-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. It shares a single visual encoder and replaces the dense decoder with a sparse MoE block, which consists of an image-level router dispatches each image to the top-2 script-aligned experts and a shared expert absorbs cross-script knowledge. Extensive experiments on our assembled TextMuSS-Bench (10 scripts, 10,899 images) show that ScriptMoE achieves the highest accuracy of 82.06%, outperforming the strongest STR baseline by 1.31%. On the CC-OCR end-to-end multilingual task, replacing only the recognizer in PP-OCRv5 with ScriptMoE lifts F1 score from 65.71% to 80.89%, slightly surpassing the best VLM (80.73%) at a fraction of the parameter count.
