用扩散模型加速文字识别,速度提升5倍且精度接近顶尖水平
DODO: Discrete OCR Diffusion Models
- 将文字识别分解为块级离散扩散生成,实现并行解码
- 在保持近似顶尖准确率的同时,推理速度提升最多5倍
- 专为严格匹配的OCR任务设计,解决传统扩散模型的结构不稳定性
光学字符识别(OCR)是数字化信息的基础任务,作为视觉数据与文本理解之间的关键桥梁。尽管现代视觉-语言模型(VLM)在此领域已达到高精度,但主要依赖自回归解码,导致长文档生成时计算成本高、速度慢,需逐个令牌顺序前向传播。我们发现关键机遇:与开放生成不同,OCR是高度确定性任务,视觉输入严格决定唯一输出序列,理论上可通过扩散模型实现高效并行解码。然而,现有掩码扩散模型无法发挥此潜力;其引入的结构不稳定性在灵活任务(如图像描述)中无害,但在要求精确匹配的OCR中会造成灾难性后果。为此,我们提出DODO,首个采用块级离散扩散的VLM,解锁了OCR的加速潜力。通过将生成分解为块,DODO缓解了全局扩散的同步误差。实证表明,该方法在保持接近最先进精度的同时,推理速度相较自回归基线最高提升5倍。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a fundamental task for digitizing information, serving as a critical bridge between visual data and textual understanding. While modern Vision-Language Models (VLM) have achieved high accuracy in this domain, they predominantly rely on autoregressive decoding, which becomes computationally expensive and slow for long documents as it requires a sequential forward pass for every generated token. We identify a key opportunity to overcome this bottleneck: unlike open-ended generation, OCR is a highly deterministic task where the visual input strictly dictates a unique output sequence, theoretically enabling efficient, parallel decoding via diffusion models. However, we show that existing masked diffusion models fail to harness this potential; those introduce structural instabilities that are benign in flexible tasks, like captioning, but catastrophic for the rigid, exact-match requirements of OCR. To bridge this gap, we introduce DODO, the first VLM to utilize block discrete diffusion and unlock its speedup potential for OCR. By decomposing generation into blocks, DODO mitigates the synchronization errors of global diffusion. Empirically, our method achieves near state-of-the-art accuracy while enabling up to 5x faster inference compared to autoregressive baselines.
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