See the Text: From Tokenization to Visual Reading
Authors: name: Ling Xing; name: Alex Jinpeng Wang; name: Rui Yan; name: Hongyu Qu; name: Zechao Li; name: Jinhui Tang
Published: 2025-10-21 17:34:48

Abstract: People see text. Humans read by recognizing words as visual objects,
including their shapes, layouts, and patterns, before connecting them to
meaning, which enables us to handle typos, distorted fonts, and various scripts
effectively. Modern large language models (LLMs), however, rely on subword
tokenization, fragmenting text into pieces from a fixed vocabulary. While
effective for high-resource languages, this approach over-segments low-resource
languages, yielding long, linguistically meaningless sequences and inflating
computation. In this work, we challenge this entrenched paradigm and move
toward a vision-centric alternative. Our method, SeeTok, renders text as images
(visual-text) and leverages pretrained multimodal LLMs to interpret them,
reusing strong OCR and text-vision alignment abilities learned from large-scale
multimodal training. Across three different language tasks, SeeTok matches or
surpasses subword tokenizers while requiring 4.43 times fewer tokens and
reducing FLOPs by 70.5%, with additional gains in cross-lingual generalization,
robustness to typographic noise, and linguistic hierarchy. SeeTok signals a
shift from symbolic tokenization to human-like visual reading, and takes a step
toward more natural and cognitively inspired language models.