ThaiOCRBench: A Task-Diverse Benchmark for Vision-Language Understanding in Thai

Surapon Nonesung, Teetouch Jaknamon, Sirinya Chaiophat, Natapong Nitarach, Chanakan Wittayasakpan, Warit Sirichotedumrong, Adisai Na-Thalang, Kunat Pipatanakul


Abstract
We present ThaiOCRBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Thai text-rich visual understanding tasks. Despite recent progress in multimodal modeling, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on high-resource languages, leaving Thai underrepresented, especially in tasks requiring document structure understanding. ThaiOCRBench addresses this gap by offering a diverse, human-annotated dataset comprising 2,808 samples across 13 task categories. We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art VLMs in a zero-shot setting, spanning both proprietary and open-source systems. Results show a significant performance gap, with proprietary models (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro) outperforming open-source counterparts. Notably, fine-grained text recognition and handwritten content extraction exhibit the steepest performance drops among open-source models. Through detailed error analysis, we identify key challenges such as language bias, structural mismatch, and hallucinated content. ThaiOCRBench provides a standardized framework for assessing VLMs in low-resource, script-complex settings, and provides actionable insights for improving Thai-language document understanding.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.89
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
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Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1653–1675
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.89/
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Cite (ACL):
Surapon Nonesung, Teetouch Jaknamon, Sirinya Chaiophat, Natapong Nitarach, Chanakan Wittayasakpan, Warit Sirichotedumrong, Adisai Na-Thalang, and Kunat Pipatanakul. 2025. ThaiOCRBench: A Task-Diverse Benchmark for Vision-Language Understanding in Thai. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1653–1675, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ThaiOCRBench: A Task-Diverse Benchmark for Vision-Language Understanding in Thai (Nonesung et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.89.pdf