A Hybrid Vision Transformer Approach for Mathematical Expression Recognition
This work proposes a hybrid Vision Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence approach to address the challenges in mathematical expression recognition arising from the two-dimensional layout and scale variations of symbols. The encoder integrates 2D positional encoding to effectively capture spatial dependencies among symbols and innovatively employs the ViT’s [CLS] token as the initial embedding for the decoder. To mitigate issues of under- or over-parsing during decoding, a coverage attention mechanism is introduced. Evaluated on the IM2LATEX-100K dataset, the proposed method achieves a BLEU score of 89.94, outperforming current state-of-the-art approaches and significantly improving the accuracy of formula recognition.