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arXiv · 2610.13465

When MLLMs miss what humans read: diagnosing and learning to read squint text

Chen Peng·Shan Huang·Jianbo Huang·Linrui Qin·Qibo Sun·Mengwei Xu
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Abstract

Multimodal LLMs can fail to read text embedded in an image's coarse structure (text a human recovers by squinting) and report that no text is present. We name this class Squint Text and study it as a recognition deficiency, motivated by cases from a production moderation pipeline. We introduce SquintBench, comprising 1076 production-derived moderation images, and SquintCtrl, a controlled synthetic suite for mechanism diagnosis. Frozen-weight analysis shows that hidden text leaves a coarse signal while glyph identity is weakly represented; identity becomes substantially more accessible when the correct spatial regions are supplied, implicating spatial selection as a major bottleneck. Suppressing high-frequency content also improves reading at a fixed visual-token budget, while visual token count may also contribute. These findings motivate Squint OPSD: a frozen teacher receives a downscaled view and the ground-truth transcription as privileged context, and its token-level distributions supervise a student along on-policy trajectories. At inference, the student reads the original image alone. Squint OPSD reaches 88.61 ANLS on SquintBench, versus 26.50 for the unadapted backbone, 24.44 for the best general-purpose model on the original view, and 68.60 at best for an off-the-shelf model under a downscaled view. These results substantially narrow the gap between available visual evidence and its generated read-out without auxiliary views at inference.

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Chen Peng, Shan Huang, Jianbo Huang, Linrui Qin, Qibo Sun, Mengwei Xu. 2026-10-09. When MLLMs miss what humans read: diagnosing and learning to read squint text. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13465

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