Multi-Expert Routing for Multi-Domain Low-Resource OCR: A Manchu Case Study
This work addresses the challenges of diverse historical Manchu handwriting styles—such as regular script, running script, and semi-cursive memorial script—and the scarcity of annotated data in optical character recognition (OCR). The authors propose a mixture-of-experts routing system that innovatively repurposes model checkpoints from iterative fine-tuning as domain-specific experts. A lightweight page-level visual style classifier enables highly accurate expert selection, achieving 99.3% routing accuracy, and dynamically instantiates new experts when no suitable one exists. Remarkably, without access to ground-truth style labels, the system attains character error rates of 0.30%, 1.57%, and 4.83% on three test sets, matching the performance upper bound achievable with oracle style labels and substantially improving cross-style Manchu text recognition under low-resource conditions.