WildHandBench: A Benchmark for Handwritten Text Understanding that Challenges MLLMs and Humans

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used as OCR systems in document and knowledge-processing pipelines, but their ability to faithfully read real handwriting remains underexplored. Existing OCR benchmarks focus largely on printed text or clean single-line inputs, leaving limited coverage of realistic handwritten OCR scenarios such as multilingual handwriting, writer errors, and structurally complex mathematical expressions. We introduce OmniHandwritingOCR, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating MLLMs and OCR systems on handwritten OCR. It covers handwritten text recognition and handwritten mathematical expression recognition across six subtasks and twelve subsets, totaling 77.57K labeled images from public datasets and newly collected student writings. A key component is a difficulty-stratified multi-line formula corpus designed to test robustness under increasing structural complexity. We evaluate thirteen open- and closed-source systems with five complementary metrics under a unified protocol. Results show that current systems remain far from faithful transcription: performance drops sharply on complex multi-line formulas, model rankings vary across language and formula settings, and several generative models hallucinate plausible but visually unsupported corrections. OmniHandwritingOCR provides a challenging testbed for diagnosing language, content, structural, and visual-grounding failure modes of multimodal models in handwritten OCR scenarios.

Document parsing models are improving rapidly, but existing benchmarks are still insufficient for a comprehensive evaluation of their capabilities. We introduce PureDocBench, a benchmark with 10 domains, 66 subcategories, and 1,475 pages. Each page has matched Clean, Digital, and Real versions, covering clean renders, simulated degradation, and real capture or sharing conditions. The resulting 4,425 images have source-derived annotations for text, formulas, tables, and reading order, checked through automated validation and human review. Keeping page content and annotations fixed allows direct comparisons across image conditions. We evaluate 58 models, including pipeline-based parsers, end-to-end parsers, and general vision-language models. The best three-track average score is 79.69 out of 100, and the mean across models is 63.84. Scores drop by 3.34 points on Digital and 11.61 points on Real on average, relative to Clean. TeleOCR leads on Clean, GLM-5.3-Flash on Digital, and Gemini 3.6 Flash on Real. The benchmark dataset, source documents, generation tools, and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/zhihengli-casia/PureDocBench.

Manual digitisation of structured handwritten documents is slow and costly. We benchmark 17 leading frontier multi-modal large language models and open-source models against a very challenging real-world medical form that mixes dates; structured, printed text; hand-written responses and significant variability challenges. None of the smaller or older models perform well but the latest Google and OpenAI models reach accuracies around $85\%$ with weighted F1 scores $\simeq 90\%$ across the discrete or predefined fields despite the very challenging nature of the responses. Clear task specific strengths emerge: GPT 5.4 excels in noisy date extraction as well as reliability with the lowest hallucination rate ($6\%$). Claude Sonnet 4.6 had the best average performance across formatted fields (dates and numerical values), while Gemini 3.1 delivered the best overall performance, with the lowest free text error rates (WER = $0.50$ and CER = $0.31$) and the strongest results across discrete classification metrics. We further show that prompt optimisation dramatically improves macro precision, recall and F1 by over $60\%$, but has little impact on weighted metrics (only $\sim2-5\%$ improvement). These results provide evidence that the rapid improvements of multimodal large language models offer a compelling pathway toward fully automated digitisation of complex handwritten workflows that is particularly relevant in low- and middle-income countries.