{"paper":{"title":"The Cursive Transformer","license":"http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.CL"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Sam Greydanus, Zachary Wimpee","submitted_at":"2025-03-31T03:22:27Z","abstract_excerpt":"Transformers trained on tokenized text, audio, and images can generate high-quality autoregressive samples. But handwriting data, represented as sequences of pen coordinates, remains underexplored. We introduce a novel tokenization scheme that converts pen stroke offsets to polar coordinates, discretizes them into bins, and then turns them into sequences of tokens with which to train a standard GPT model. This allows us to capture complex stroke distributions without using any specialized architectures (eg. the mixture density network or the self-advancing ASCII attention head from Graves 2014"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2504.00051","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2504.00051/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}