Abstract: The emergence of transformer models like BERT, GPT-2, GPT-3, RoBERTa, T5 for natural language understanding tasks has opened the floodgates towards solving a wide array of machine learning tasks in other modalities like images, audio, music, sketches and so on. These language models are domain-agnostic and as a result could be applied to 1-D sequences of any kind. However, the key challenge lies in bridging the modality gap so that they could generate strong features beneficial for out-of-domain tasks. This work focuses on leveraging the power of such pre-trained language models and discusses the challenges in predicting challenging handwritten symbols and alphabets.
