When VLMs 'Fix' Students: Identifying and Penalizing Over-Correction in the Evaluation of Multi-line Handwritten Math OCR
Accurate transcription of handwritten mathematics is crucial for educational AI systems, yet current benchmarks fail to evaluate this capability properly. Most prior studies focus on single-line expressions and rely on lexical metrics such as BLEU, which fail to assess the semantic reasoning across multi-line student solutions. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of multi-line handwritten math Optical Character Recognition (OCR), revealing a critical failure mode of Vision-Language Models (VLMs): over-correction. Instead of faithfully transcribing a student's work, these models often "fix" errors, thereby hiding the very mistakes an educational assessment aims to detect. ...
| Authors | Jin Seong, Wencke Liermann, Minho Kim et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 1 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 May 2026 |
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