# Beyond Pixel Reconstruction: Retrieval-Guided Glyph-Aware Restoration for Low-Resource Manchu Historical Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00315 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00315/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Text Image Inpainting via Global Structure-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14832/) (2024)
- [PixelHacker: Image Inpainting with Structural and Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20438/) (2025)
- [Unified Diffusion Transformer for High-fidelity Text-Aware Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08922/) (2025)
- [TextDoctor: Unified Document Image Inpainting via Patch Pyramid Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04021/) (2025)
- [EpiAgent: An Agent-Centric System for Ancient Inscription Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09367/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Historical Manchu documents preserve invaluable linguistic and cultural heritage, yet their digitization is hindered by severe degradations and the scarcity of paired training data. Existing document restoration methods primarily optimize pixel-level reconstruction, which can produce visually plausible results while failing to preserve the structural identity of Manchu glyphs. To address this limitation, we propose a retrieval-guided glyph-aware restoration framework that goes beyond pixel reconstruction by explicitly incorporating glyph-level structural knowledge. Our method retrieves relevant glyph exemplars to provide structural guidance during restoration and integrates this information into the reconstruction process, improving the recovery of degraded character structures under low-resource conditions. Extensive experiments on Manchu historical documents demonstrate that the proposed approach improves both image restoration quality and glyph-level fidelity compared with existing restoration methods. These results highlight the importance of incorporating character-aware structural priors for reliable restoration of low-resource historical documents.