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
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.