V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me
Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Jiapeng Wang, YiFan Zhang, Zhuoma GongQue, Chong Sun
Abstract
Oracle Bone Script (OBS) is a vital treasure of human civilization, rich in insights from ancient societies. However, the evolution of written language over millennia complicates its decipherment. In this paper, we propose V-Oracle, an innovative framework that utilizes Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) for interpreting OBS. V-Oracle applies principles of pictographic character formation and frames the task as a visual question-answering (VQA) problem, establishing a multi-step reasoning chain. It proposes a multi-dimensional data augmentation for synthesizing high-quality OBS samples, and also implements a multi-phase oracle alignment tuning to improve LMMs’ visual reasoning capabilities. Moreover, to bridge the evaluation gap in the OBS field, we further introduce Oracle-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that emphasizes process-oriented assessment and incorporates both standard and out-of-distribution setups for realistic evaluation. Extensive experimental results can demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in providing quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{qiao-etal-2025-v,
title = "{V}-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me",
author = "Qiao, Runqi and
Tan, Qiuna and
Dong, Guanting and
MinhuiWu, MinhuiWu and
Wang, Jiapeng and
Zhang, YiFan and
GongQue, Zhuoma and
Sun, Chong and
Xu, Yida and
Xue, Yadong and
Tian, Ye and
Bao, Zhimin and
Yang, Lan and
Li, Chen and
Zhang, Honggang",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.986/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.986",
pages = "20124--20150",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}