Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition via Paired Adversarial Learning

Recognition of handwritten mathematical expressions (MEs) is an important problem that has wide applications in practice. Handwritten ME recognition is challenging due to the variety of writing styles and ME formats. As a result, recognizers trained by optimizing the traditional supervision loss do not perform satisfactorily. To improve the robustness of the recognizer with respect to writing styles, in this work, we propose a novel paired adversarial learning method to learn semantic-invariant features. Specifically, our proposed model, named PAL-v2, consists of an attention-based recognizer and a discriminator. During training, handwritten MEs and their printed templates are fed into PAL-v2 simultaneously. The attention-based recognizer is trained to learn semantic-invariant features with the guide of the discriminator. Moreover, we adopt a convolutional decoder to alleviate the vanishing and exploding gradient problems of RNN-based decoder, and further, improve the coverage of decoding with a novel attention method. We conducted extensive experiments on the CROHME dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of each part of the method and achieved state-of-the-art performance.