V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me

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. More-over, 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 re-sults can demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in providing quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability.