{"ID":6267048,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-10T01:11:38.759438437Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-13T01:02:08.706470581Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08143","arxiv_id":"2607.08143","title":"ICDAR 2026 HIPE-OCRepair Competition on LLM-Assisted OCR Post-Correction for Historical Documents","abstract":"We present the results of HIPE-OCRepair-2026, an ICDAR competition on LLM-assisted OCR post-correction of historical documents. OCR post-correction remains a long-standing challenge in digital heritage: large-scale collections of digitized documents are affected by legacy OCR errors, while re-digitization at scale remains impractical. Large language models (LLMs) offers a major opportunity to revisit this challenge, yet their effectiveness across languages, document types, and noise conditions - and their tendency to hallucinate - remains insufficiently understood. HIPE-OCRepair-2026 pursues two objectives: (i) to evaluate the capabilities of modern OCR post-correction systems, and (ii) to provide a reproducible evaluation framework anchored in the HIPE-OCRepair-2026 dataset, a harmonized multilingual resource consolidating existing and newly curated historical datasets. Participants were tasked with correcting noisy OCR transcripts from historical newspapers and printed works in English, French, and German (17th-20th century), working at the level of coherent transcription units (paragraphs or articles) without access to source images. The evaluation adopts a retrieval-oriented rather than diplomatic scoring approach, reflecting the practical use case of search and access over digitized collections. Four teams submitted systems ranging from zero-shot prompting to continued pre-training and fine-tuning, offering insights into the merits of different adaptation strategies. Results show that modern LLM-assisted systems can significantly improve OCR quality, but performance varies across datasets, languages, and noise levels. Over-correction on low-noise inputs emerges as a recurring challenge, highlighting the importance of evaluation beyond character error reduction. The dataset, scorer, and evaluation pipeline are publicly released to support future research.","short_abstract":"We present the results of HIPE-OCRepair-2026, an ICDAR competition on LLM-assisted OCR post-correction of historical documents. OCR post-correction remains a long-standing challenge in digital heritage: large-scale collections of digitized documents are affected by legacy OCR errors, while re-digitization at scale rema...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08143","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.08143v1","authors":"[\"Maud Ehrmann\",\"Emanuela Boros\",\"Juri Opitz\",\"Andrianos Michail\",\"Florian Wagner\",\"Simon Clematide\"]","published":"2026-07-09T06:26:13Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.IR\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}