$A^2R^2$: Advancing Img2LaTeX Conversion via Visual Reasoning with Attention-Guided Refinement

Abstract

Img2LaTeX is a practically important task that involves translating mathematical expressions and structured visual content from images into LaTeX code. In recent years, vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a range of visual understanding tasks, largely due to their strong generalization capabilities. However, despite initial efforts to apply VLMs to the Img2LaTeX task, their performance remains suboptimal. Empirical evidence shows that VLMs can be challenged by fine-grained visual elements, such as subscripts and superscripts in mathematical expressions, which results in inaccurate LaTeX generation. To address this challenge, we propose $A^2R^2$: Advancing Img2LaTeX Conversion via Visual Reasoning with Attention-Guided Refinement, a framework that effectively integrates attention localization and iterative refinement within a visual reasoning framework, enabling VLMs to perform self-correction and progressively improve LaTeX generation quality. For effective evaluation, we introduce a new dataset, Img2LaTex-Hard-1K, consisting of 1,100 carefully curated and challenging examples designed to rigorously evaluate the capabilities of VLMs within this task domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that: (1) $A^2R^2$ significantly improves model performance across various evaluation metrics spanning both textual and visual levels; (2) Increasing the number of inference rounds yields notable performance gains, underscoring the potential of $A^2R^2$ in test-time scaling scenarios; (3) Ablation studies and further evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our approach and the synergy of its core components during inference.