Nurmemet Yolwas

Lixu Sun, Nurmemet Yolwas, Wushour Silamu

Scene Text Recognition (STR) remains challenging due to real-world complexities, where decoupled visual-linguistic optimization in existing frameworks amplifies error propagation through cross-modal misalignment. Visual encoders exhibit attention bias toward background distractors, while decoders suffer from spatial misalignment when parsing geometrically deformed text-collectively degrading recognition accuracy for irregular patterns. Inspired by the hierarchical cognitive processes in human visual perception, we propose OTSNet, a novel three-stage network embodying a neurocognitive-inspired Observation-Thinking-Spelling pipeline for unified STR modeling. The architecture comprises three core components: (1) a Dual Attention Macaron Encoder (DAME) that refines visual features through differential attention maps to suppress irrelevant regions and enhance discriminative focus; (2) a Position-Aware Module (PAM) and Semantic Quantizer (SQ) that jointly integrate spatial context with glyph-level semantic abstraction via adaptive sampling; and (3) a Multi-Modal Collaborative Verifier (MMCV) that enforces self-correction through cross-modal fusion of visual, semantic, and character-level features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OTSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining 83.5% average accuracy on the challenging Union14M-L benchmark and 79.1% on the heavily occluded OST dataset-establishing new records across 9 out of 14 evaluation scenarios.

Guodong Ma, Pengfei Hu, Nurmemet Yolwas et al.

Consonant and vowel reduction are often encountered in speech, which might cause performance degradation in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our recently proposed learning strategy based on masking, Phone Masking Training (PMT), alleviates the impact of such phenomenon in Uyghur ASR. Although PMT achieves remarkably improvements, there still exists room for further gains due to the granularity mismatch between the masking unit of PMT (phoneme) and the modeling unit (word-piece). To boost the performance of PMT, we propose multi-modeling unit training (MMUT) architecture fusion with PMT (PM-MMUT). The idea of MMUT framework is to split the Encoder into two parts including acoustic feature sequences to phoneme-level representation (AF-to-PLR) and phoneme-level representation to word-piece-level representation (PLR-to-WPLR). It allows AF-to-PLR to be optimized by an intermediate phoneme-based CTC loss to learn the rich phoneme-level context information brought by PMT. Experimental results on Uyghur ASR show that the proposed approaches outperform obviously the pure PMT. We also conduct experiments on the 960-hour Librispeech benchmark using ESPnet1, which achieves about 10% relative WER reduction on all the test set without LM fusion comparing with the latest official ESPnet1 pre-trained model.