Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2026

N-gram Injection into Transformers for Dynamic Language Model Adaptation in Handwritten Text Recognition

Résumé

Transformer-based encoder-decoder networks have recently achieved impressive results in handwritten text recognition, partly thanks to their auto-regressive decoder which implicitly learns a language model. However, such networks suffer from a large performance drop when evaluated on a target corpus whose language distribution is shifted from the source text seen during training. To retain recognition accuracy despite this language shift, we propose an external n-gram injection (NGI) for dynamic adaptation of the network's language modeling at inference time. Our method allows switching to an n-gram language model estimated on a corpus close to the target distribution, therefore mitigating bias without any extra training on target image-text pairs. We opt for an early injection of the n-gram into the transformer decoder so that the network learns to fully leverage text-only data at the low additional cost of n-gram inference. Experiments on three handwritten datasets demonstrate that the proposed NGI significantly reduces the performance gap between source and target corpora.

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hal-05537580 , version 1 (05-03-2026)

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Florent Meyer, Laurent Guichard, Yann Soullard, Denis Coquenet, Guillaume Gravier, et al.. N-gram Injection into Transformers for Dynamic Language Model Adaptation in Handwritten Text Recognition. 2026. ⟨hal-05537580⟩
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