Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents

Math Working Group,

Hello. I would like to share a hyperlink to a new and interesting AI project: Nougat (https://facebookresearch.github.io/nougat/ , https://github.com/facebookresearch/nougat).

Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents (2023) (https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13418)
Lukas Blecher, Guillem Cucurull, Thomas Scialom, Robert Stojnic

Scientific knowledge is predominantly stored in books and scientific journals, often in the form of PDFs. However, the PDF format leads to a loss of semantic information, particularly for mathematical expressions. We propose Nougat (Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents), a Visual Transformer model that performs an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) task for processing scientific documents into a markup language, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on a new dataset of scientific documents. The proposed approach offers a promising solution to enhance the accessibility of scientific knowledge in the digital age, by bridging the gap between human-readable documents and machine-readable text. We release the models and code to accelerate future work on scientific text recognition.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski