Junle Liu
2026
Draft, Verify, Restore: Self-Refining Historical Inscription Restoration with a Unified MLLM
Yuyi Zhang | Junle Liu | Peirong Zhang | Jianliang Liu | Zhenhua Yang | Lianwen Jin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuyi Zhang | Junle Liu | Peirong Zhang | Jianliang Liu | Zhenhua Yang | Lianwen Jin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Inscriptions are invaluable cultural heritage, yet centuries of degradation (e.g., fractures, erosion, oxidation) have rendered many partially illegible. Existing Historical Inscription Restoration (HIR) methods rely on task-separated pipelines with irreversible error accumulation and patch-based generation that sacrifices page-level consistency. Therefore, we present UniHIR, the first unified MLLM for end-to-end historical inscription restoration. It integrates two novel designs, Draft-Guided Localization and Hierarchical Self-Refinement, to enable accurate damage localization and illegible-content prediction via iterative reasoning and self-correction. This unified approach enables true page-level restoration with consistent typography and style. To support training under high-resolution inputs and long sequences, we design UHIRFactory and construct HIRBench, enabling step-wise, memory-efficient instruction tuning with step-aware annotations for intermediate drafts and refinements. Experiments demonstrate that UniHIR achieves superior performance in both text restoration accuracy and appearance restoration quality, validating that HIR can be effectively tackled by a standalone model in a unified manner. The model and code are available at https://github.com/ZZXF11/UniHIR.