Papers › Teaching Machines to Code: Neural Markup Generation with Visual Attention

Teaching Machines to Code: Neural Markup Generation with Visual Attention

15 Feb 2018arXiv:1802.05415archive 2025-07-28

Sumeet S. Singh

We present a neural transducer model with visual attention that learns to generate LaTeX markup of a real-world math formula given its image. Applying sequence modeling and transduction techniques that have been very successful across modalities such as natural language, image, handwriting, speech and audio; we construct an image-to-markup model that learns to produce syntactically and semantically correct LaTeX markup code over 150 words long and achieves a BLEU score of 89%; improving upon the previous state-of-art for the Im2Latex problem. We also demonstrate with heat-map visualization how attention helps in interpreting the model and can pinpoint (detect and localize) symbols on the image accurately despite having been trained without any bounding box data.

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Code

untrix/im2latex mentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtfAGPL-3.0 report

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Tasks

MathOptical Character Recognition (OCR)

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

I2L-140KIm2latex-90k

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) I2L-140K I2L-NOPOOL BLEU 89.09% #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) I2L-140K I2L-STRIPS BLEU 89% #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) im2latex-100k I2L-STRIPS BLEU 88.86% #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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