Practical Fine-Tuning of Autoregressive Models on Limited Handwritten Texts

A common use case for OCR applications involves users uploading documents and progressively correcting automatic recognition to obtain the final transcript. This correction phase presents an opportunity for progressive adaptation of the OCR model, making it crucial to adapt early, while ensuring stability and reliability. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art transformer-based models can effectively support this adaptation, gradually reducing the annotator's workload. Our results show that fine-tuning can reliably start with just 16 lines, yielding a 10% relative improvement in CER, and scale up to 40% with 256 lines. We further investigate the impact of model components, clarifying the roles of the encoder and decoder in the fine-tuning process. To guide adaptation, we propose reliable stopping criteria, considering both direct approaches and global trend analysis. Additionally, we show that OCR models can be leveraged to cut annotation costs by half through confidence-based selection of informative lines, achieving the same performance with fewer annotations.