A Bayesian model for recognizing handwritten mathematical expressions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recognizing handwritten mathematics is a challenging classification problem, requiring simultaneous identification of all the symbols comprising an input as well as the complex two-dimensional relationships between symbols and subexpressions. Because of the ambiguity present in handwritten input, it is often unrealistic to hope for consistently perfect recognition accuracy. We present a system which captures all recognizable interpretations of the input and organizes them in a parse forest from which individual parse trees may be extracted and reported. If the top-ranked interpretation is incorrect, the user may request alternates and select the recognition result they desire. The tree extraction step uses a novel probabilistic tree scoring strategy in which a Bayesian network is constructed based on the structure of the input, and each joint variable assignment corresponds to a different parse tree. Parse trees are then reported in order of decreasing probability. Two accuracy evaluations demonstrate that the resulting recognition system is more accurate than previous versions (which used non-probabilistic methods) and other academic math recognizers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".