EpiAgent: An Agent-Centric System for Ancient Inscription Restoration
This addresses the challenge of digital heritage preservation for cultural artifacts, representing an incremental advance by adapting agent-based methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of restoring degraded ancient inscriptions by proposing EpiAgent, an agent-centric system that formulates restoration as hierarchical planning, achieving superior restoration quality and stronger generalization compared to existing methods.
Ancient inscriptions, as repositories of cultural memory, have suffered from centuries of environmental and human-induced degradation. Restoring their intertwined visual and textual integrity poses one of the most demanding challenges in digital heritage preservation. However, existing AI-based approaches often rely on rigid pipelines, struggling to generalize across such complex and heterogeneous real-world degradations. Inspired by the skill-coordinated workflow of human epigraphers, we propose EpiAgent, an agent-centric system that formulates inscription restoration as a hierarchical planning problem. Following an Observe-Conceive-Execute-Reevaluate paradigm, an LLM-based central planner orchestrates collaboration among multimodal analysis, historical experience, specialized restoration tools, and iterative self-refinement. This agent-centric coordination enables a flexible and adaptive restoration process beyond conventional single-pass methods. Across real-world degraded inscriptions, EpiAgent achieves superior restoration quality and stronger generalization compared to existing methods. Our work marks an important step toward expert-level agent-driven restoration of cultural heritage. The code is available at https://github.com/blackprotoss/EpiAgent.