Generative Text Modelling and Language-Guided Visual Attention for Deciphering Palimpsests

Recovering obscured text in palimpsests, i.e. the manuscripts where the original writing (under-text) was erased and overwritten for reuse, is vital for preserving lost information. Due to the nature of the material, such a task can be highly challenging and time-consuming. This paper presents an approach towards automated palimpsest handwritten text modeling for under-text recovery. We investigate generative models, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models, and design a custom denoising diffusion model that learns structured noise patterns to reconstruct the under-text. The recovered text is subsequently processed by a fine-tuned, attention-based handwritten text recognition network. Furthermore, we investigate a language-guided recognition framework that leverages textual class descriptions as informative priors, enabling the text recognition model to distinguish meaningful features from noise. This is achieved by grounding task-specific descriptions, phrased in words or sentences, through visual attention maps generated by pretrained vision-language models like CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training). To facilitate future research and benchmarking, we release new datasets for synthetic palimpsests (currently scarce), CLIP-compatible text descriptions, and pre-trained models with code.