OracleAgent: A Multimodal Reasoning Agent for Oracle Bone Script Research

As one of the earliest writing systems, Oracle Bone Script (OBS) preserves the cultural and intellectual heritage of ancient civilizations. However, current OBS research faces two major challenges: (1) the interpretation of OBS involves a complex workflow comprising multiple serial and parallel sub-tasks, and (2) the efficiency of OBS information organization and retrieval remains a critical bottleneck, as scholars often spend substantial effort searching for, compiling, and managing relevant resources. To address these challenges, we present OracleAgent, the first agent system designed for the structured management and retrieval of OBS-related information. OracleAgent seamlessly integrates multiple OBS analysis tools, empowered by large language models (LLMs), and can flexibly orchestrate these components. Additionally, we construct a comprehensive domain-specific multimodal knowledge base for OBS, which is built through a rigorous multi-year process of data collection, cleaning, and expert annotation. The knowledge base comprises over 1.4M single-character rubbing images and 80K interpretation texts. OracleAgent leverages this resource through its multimodal tools to assist experts in retrieval tasks of character, document, interpretation text, and rubbing image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OracleAgent achieves superior performance across a range of multimodal reasoning and generation tasks, surpassing leading mainstream multimodal large language models (MLLMs) (e.g., GPT-4o). Furthermore, our case study illustrates that OracleAgent can effectively assist domain experts, significantly reducing the time cost of OBS research. These results highlight OracleAgent as a significant step toward the practical deployment of OBS-assisted research and automated interpretation systems.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset

Oracle bone inscriptions(OBI) is the earliest developed writing system in China, bearing invaluable written exemplifications of early Shang history and paleography. However, the task of deciphering OBI, in the current climate of the scholarship, can prove extremely challenging. Out of the 4,500 oracle bone characters excavated, only a third have been successfully identified. Therefore, leveraging the advantages of advanced AI technology to assist in the decipherment of OBI is a highly essential research topic. However, fully utilizing AI's capabilities in these matters is reliant on having a comprehensive and high-quality annotated OBI dataset at hand whereas most existing datasets are only annotated in just a single or a few dimensions, limiting the value of their potential application. For instance, the Oracle-MNIST dataset only offers 30k images classified into 10 categories. Therefore, this paper proposes an Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset(OBIMD), which includes annotation information for 10,077 pieces of oracle bones. Each piece has two modalities: pixel-level aligned rubbings and facsimiles. The dataset annotates the detection boxes, character categories, transcriptions, corresponding inscription groups, and reading sequences in the groups of each oracle bone character, providing a comprehensive and high-quality level of annotations. This dataset can be used for a variety of AI-related research tasks relevant to the field of OBI, such as OBI Character Detection and Recognition, Rubbing Denoising, Character Matching, Character Generation, Reading Sequence Prediction, Missing Characters Completion task and so on. We believe that the creation and publication of a dataset like this will help significantly advance the application of AI algorithms in the field of OBI research.