Old Uyghur OCR: The First Work-in-Progress via Reproducing Fine-tuning of VLMs

Old Uyghur manuscripts remain largely inaccessible due to the absence of optical character recognition (OCR) systems aligned with modern scholarly practices. To address this, we present a work‑in‑progress OCR approach using fine-tuning of vision–language models (VLMs) for Old Uyghur transliteration. Specifically, LLaMA‑3.2‑11B‑Vision was fine‑tuned with 4‑bit Unsloth quantization and LoRA on 525 manually annotated pages from Radloff and Malov’s edition of Altun Yaruk Sudur, following Unicode‑based transliteration guidelines. On a held‑out test set of 16 pages from one bölük (part) of the fifth tägzinč, the approach yielded a character error rate (CER) of 5.46% and normalized edit distance (NED) of 0.286. These results demonstrate feasibility; however, limitations are evident owing to binarized scans, a single woodblock style, small training data, and lack of positional supervision. Consequently, findings provide a baseline and a reproducible path toward robust Old Uyghur OCR.