Intelligent education systems often collect exam sheets as in-the-wild photos. These photos often suffer from distortions and noise caused by handwriting and occlusions, collectively referred to as Real-World Degraded Exam Images (RDEI). Structure-preserving reconstruction is key to converting RDEI into structured assets for downstream educational applications. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often fail under RDEI, leading to disrupted structure and evidence-unsupported hallucinations. To tackle these challenges, we propose MessToClean, a backbone-agnostic, evidence-driven pipeline that treats off-the-shelf MLLMs as interchangeable components. By grounding extraction in pixel-aligned evidence and enforcing post-hoc consistency auditing on recovered structures, MessToClean mitigates unsupported hallucinations and enhances both controllability and structural fidelity in question-level reconstruction. We curate RDEI-Exam from our educational platforms and evaluate across 12 state-of-the-art MLLM backbones. Across these, MessToClean improves stem consistency by 1.01-3.18%, figure consistency by 0.50-49.16%, and refusal F1 by 1.06-10.88% across question types.

This paper proposes Attention-Seeker, an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method that leverages self-attention maps from a Large Language Model to estimate the importance of candidate phrases. Our approach identifies specific components – such as layers, heads, and attention vectors – where the model pays significant attention to the key topics of the text. The attention weights provided by these components are then used to score the candidate phrases. Unlike previous models that require manual tuning of parameters (e.g., selection of heads, prompts, hyperparameters), Attention-Seeker dynamically adapts to the input text without any manual adjustments, enhancing its practical applicability. We evaluate Attention-Seeker on four publicly available datasets: Inspec, SemEval2010, SemEval2017, and Krapivin. Our results demonstrate that, even without parameter tuning, Attention-Seeker outperforms most baseline models, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three out of four datasets, particularly excelling in extracting keyphrases from long documents.