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.

Historical documents represent an invaluable cultural heritage, yet have undergone significant degradation over time through tears, water erosion, and oxidation. Existing Historical Document Restoration (HDR) methods primarily focus on single modality or limited-size restoration, failing to meet practical needs. To fill this gap, we present a full-page HDR dataset (FPHDR) and a novel automated HDR solution (AutoHDR). Specifically, FPHDR comprises 1,633 real and 6,543 synthetic images with character-level and line-level locations, as well as character annotations in different damage grades. AutoHDR mimics historians’ restoration workflows through a three-stage approach: OCR-assisted damage localization, vision-language context text prediction, and patch autoregressive appearance restoration. The modular architecture of AutoHDR enables seamless human-machine collaboration, allowing for flexible intervention and optimization at each restoration stage. Experiments demonstrate AutoHDR’s remarkable performance in HDR. When processing severely damaged documents, our system improves OCR accuracy from 46.83% to 84.05%, with further enhancement to 94.25% through human-machine collaboration. We believe this work represents a significant advancement in automated historical document restoration and contributes substantially to cultural heritage preservation. The model and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/AutoHDR.

Contract analysis can significantly ease the work for humans using AI techniques. This paper shows a problem of Element Tagging on Insurance Policy (ETIP). A novel Text-Of-Interest Convolutional Neural Network (TOI-CNN) is proposed for the ETIP solution. We introduce a TOI pooling layer to replace traditional pooling layer for processing the nested phrasal or clausal elements in insurance policies. The advantage of TOI pooling layer is that the nested elements from one sentence could share computation and context in the forward and backward passes. The computation of backpropagation through TOI pooling is also demonstrated in the paper. We have collected a large Chinese insurance contract dataset and labeled the critical elements of seven categories to test the performance of the proposed method. The results show the promising performance of our method in the ETIP problem.