Blame errant words,
not the canvas.
Defect-Aware Spatial Credit Assignment
for Visual Text Generation
Abstract
Recent reinforcement learning approaches have improved visual text generation, yet generated images still suffer from incorrect wording and malformed glyphs. We identify two coupled limitations: recognition-based rewards often overlook visible glyph defects, while whole-image scalar feedback obscures the uneven quality of individual text regions. These limitations motivate our central principle: Blame errant words, not the canvas, to effectively preserve local quality distinctions from evaluation to policy optimization.
First, we introduce TextDART, a defect-aware region-targeted reward model that localizes individual text regions and independently evaluates their semantic correctness and glyph quality, providing fine-grained, region-precise feedback. Building on TextDART, we propose SCANNER, which turns these regional judgments into spatially differentiated policy feedback. It normalizes rewards for each text target across sampled images and casts the resulting regional advantages onto the corresponding latent tokens. Extensive experiments on existing benchmarks and our newly established PolyText-Bench demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in text accuracy and glyph fidelity.
Method
TextDART
Defect-Aware Region-Targeted Rewards
Localized Defect Perception
Localize each text region and recognize its content while identifying malformed glyphs.
Regional rewards
Evaluate semantic correctness and glyph quality independently to produce region-targeted rewards.
SCANNER
Spatial Credit Assignment with noise-awareness
Target-group advantages
Normalize rewards for each text target across sampled images and project the regional advantages onto their latent tokens.
Noise-aware schedule
Fuse global and regional advantages as noise decreases, shifting from global guidance to local feedback.
Target-level policy ratios
Pool policy ratios over each targetβs token support to retain regional distinctions during optimization.
Interactive demo
<#>RESH DAILY
Recognition results
PP-OCRv5, TextPecker and TextDART on five challenging text scenes. Images and transcriptions are displayed directly from the supplied files.
Generation
Qualitative results
Quantitative results
Visual text generation across five benchmarks: English results for FLUX.1-dev, and English and Chinese results for Qwen-Image-2512.
β Higher is better. β Lower is better. Bold indicates the best result within each backbone and language setting. βββ denotes no reward model, no RL algorithm, or an unsupported metric.
Citation
@article{hu2026textdartscanner,
title={Blame Errant Words, Not the Canvas: Defect-Aware Spatial Credit Assignment for Visual Text Generation},
author={Hu, Sujie and Zhang, Huaisong and Yang, Pujing and Wang, Qian and Li, Xiaomin and Leng, Xinhang and Li, Chen and Lyu, Jing and Li, Xiu and Pan, Ling},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.20794},
year={2026}
}