Zengmao Ding

Bang Li, Donghao Luo, Yujie Liang et al. · tencent-ai

Oracle bone inscriptions(OBI) is the earliest developed writing system in China, bearing invaluable written exemplifications of early Shang history and paleography. However, the task of deciphering OBI, in the current climate of the scholarship, can prove extremely challenging. Out of the 4,500 oracle bone characters excavated, only a third have been successfully identified. Therefore, leveraging the advantages of advanced AI technology to assist in the decipherment of OBI is a highly essential research topic. However, fully utilizing AI's capabilities in these matters is reliant on having a comprehensive and high-quality annotated OBI dataset at hand whereas most existing datasets are only annotated in just a single or a few dimensions, limiting the value of their potential application. For instance, the Oracle-MNIST dataset only offers 30k images classified into 10 categories. Therefore, this paper proposes an Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset(OBIMD), which includes annotation information for 10,077 pieces of oracle bones. Each piece has two modalities: pixel-level aligned rubbings and facsimiles. The dataset annotates the detection boxes, character categories, transcriptions, corresponding inscription groups, and reading sequences in the groups of each oracle bone character, providing a comprehensive and high-quality level of annotations. This dataset can be used for a variety of AI-related research tasks relevant to the field of OBI, such as OBI Character Detection and Recognition, Rubbing Denoising, Character Matching, Character Generation, Reading Sequence Prediction, Missing Characters Completion task and so on. We believe that the creation and publication of a dataset like this will help significantly advance the application of AI algorithms in the field of OBI research.

Gengluo Li, Shangpin Peng, Xingyu Wan et al.

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in modern text-rich visual understanding. However, their perceptual robustness in the face of the continuous morphological evolution of historical writing systems remains largely unexplored. Existing ancient text datasets typically focus on isolated historical periods, failing to capture the systematic visual distribution shifts spanning thousands of years. To bridge this gap and empower Digital Humanities, we introduce Chronicles-OCR, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the cross-temporal visual perception capabilities of VLLMs across the complete evolutionary trajectory of Chinese characters, known as the Seven Chinese Scripts. Curated in collaboration with top-tier institutional domain experts, the dataset comprises 2,800 strictly balanced images encompassing highly diverse physical media, ranging from tortoise shells to paper-based calligraphy. To accommodate the drastic morphological and topological variations across different historical stages, we propose a novel Stage-Adaptive Annotation Paradigm. Based on this, Chronicles-OCR formulates four rigorous quantitative tasks: cross-period character spotting, fine-grained archaic character recognition via visual referring, ancient text parsing, and script classification. By isolating visual perception from semantic reasoning, Chronicles-OCR provides an authoritative platform to expose the limitations of current VLLMs, paving the way for robust, evolution-aware historical text perception. Chronicles-OCR is publicly available at https://github.com/VirtualLUOUCAS/Chronicles-OCR.

Caoshuo Li, Zengmao Ding, Xiaobin Hu et al.

As one of the earliest writing systems, Oracle Bone Script (OBS) preserves the cultural and intellectual heritage of ancient civilizations. However, current OBS research faces two major challenges: (1) the interpretation of OBS involves a complex workflow comprising multiple serial and parallel sub-tasks, and (2) the efficiency of OBS information organization and retrieval remains a critical bottleneck, as scholars often spend substantial effort searching for, compiling, and managing relevant resources. To address these challenges, we present OracleAgent, the first agent system designed for the structured management and retrieval of OBS-related information. OracleAgent seamlessly integrates multiple OBS analysis tools, empowered by large language models (LLMs), and can flexibly orchestrate these components. Additionally, we construct a comprehensive domain-specific multimodal knowledge base for OBS, which is built through a rigorous multi-year process of data collection, cleaning, and expert annotation. The knowledge base comprises over 1.4M single-character rubbing images and 80K interpretation texts. OracleAgent leverages this resource through its multimodal tools to assist experts in retrieval tasks of character, document, interpretation text, and rubbing image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OracleAgent achieves superior performance across a range of multimodal reasoning and generation tasks, surpassing leading mainstream multimodal large language models (MLLMs) (e.g., GPT-4o). Furthermore, our case study illustrates that OracleAgent can effectively assist domain experts, significantly reducing the time cost of OBS research. These results highlight OracleAgent as a significant step toward the practical deployment of OBS-assisted research and automated interpretation systems.

Caoshuo Li, Zengmao Ding, Xiaobin Hu et al. · tencent-ai

As one of the earliest ancient languages, Oracle Bone Script (OBS) encapsulates the cultural records and intellectual expressions of ancient civilizations. Despite the discovery of approximately 4,500 OBS characters, only about 1,600 have been deciphered. The remaining undeciphered ones, with their complex structure and abstract imagery, pose significant challenges for interpretation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel two-stage semantic typography framework, named OracleFusion. In the first stage, this approach leverages the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with enhanced Spatial Awareness Reasoning (SAR) to analyze the glyph structure of the OBS character and perform visual localization of key components. In the second stage, we introduce Oracle Structural Vector Fusion (OSVF), incorporating glyph structure constraints and glyph maintenance constraints to ensure the accurate generation of semantically enriched vector fonts. This approach preserves the objective integrity of the glyph structure, offering visually enhanced representations that assist experts in deciphering OBS. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that OracleFusion outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models in terms of semantics, visual appeal, and glyph maintenance, significantly enhancing both readability and aesthetic quality. Furthermore, OracleFusion provides expert-like insights on unseen oracle characters, making it a valuable tool for advancing the decipherment of OBS.