Work

Stroke and structure priors improve few-shot recognition of oracle bone inscriptions

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBIs) recognition is challenging because glyph classes are numerous, long-tailed, and morphologically variable. We compare repository-based Teacher supervision with stroke and structure priors for class-disjoint few-shot OBI recognition. On the OBC306 dataset, using 42 classes, no-replacement sampling, and 10,000 episodes per shot, original-Teacher, no-Teacher FEAT, and glyph-prior FEAT achieve 74.31/75.44/77.56% at 1 shot and 88.99/89.88/91.67% at 50 shots across three seeds. Glyph priors improve no-Teacher FEAT by 1.79–2.15 points; paired 95% intervals exclude zero. Teacher targets are nearly uniform. Objective-weighting and label-agreement controls recover most of the gap, whereas a balanced subset reverses the effect. On near-saturated HWOBC, seed-0 gains are only 0.015–0.044 points. Baseline, query, module, complexity, and qualitative controls bound conclusions. Morphology-aware features improve OBI few-shot recognition, while Teacher utility depends on repository, objective, and data regime.

Source: npj Heritage Science

DOI: 10.1038/s40494-026-02946-1