Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is crucial in machine learning applications to mitigate the risk of model overconfidence, thereby enhancing the reliability and safety of deployed systems. The majority of existing OOD detection methods predominantly address uni-modal inputs, such as images or texts. In the context of multi-modal documents, there is a notable lack of extensive research on the performance of these methods, which have primarily been developed with a focus on computer vision tasks. We propose a novel methodology termed as attention head masking (AHM) for multi-modal OOD tasks in document classification systems. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed AHM method outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches and significantly decreases the false positive rate (FPR) compared to existing solutions up to 7.5\%. This methodology generalizes well to multi-modal data, such as documents, where visual and textual information are modeled under the same Transformer architecture. To address the scarcity of high-quality publicly available document datasets and encourage further research on OOD detection for documents, we introduce FinanceDocs, a new document AI dataset. Our code and dataset are publicly available.
The EU AI Act mandates that providers and deployers of high-risk AI systems establish a quality management system (QMS). Among other criteria, a QMS shall help verify and document the AI system design and quality and monitor the proper implementation of all high-risk AI system requirements. Current research rarely explores practical solutions for implementing the EU AI Act. Instead, it tends to focus on theoretical concepts. As a result, more attention must be paid to tools that help humans actively check and document AI systems and orchestrate the implementation of all high-risk AI system requirements. Therefore, this paper introduces a new design concept and prototype for a QMS as a microservice Software as a Service web application. It connects directly to the AI system for verification and documentation and enables the orchestration and integration of various sub-services, which can be individually designed, each tailored to specific high-risk AI system requirements. The first version of the prototype connects to the Phi-3-mini-128k-instruct LLM as an example of an AI system and integrates a risk management system and a data management system. The prototype is evaluated through a qualitative assessment of the implemented requirements, a GPU memory and performance analysis, and an evaluation with IT, AI, and legal experts.
Office automation significantly enhances human productivity by automatically finishing routine tasks in the workflow. Beyond the basic information extraction studied in much of the prior document AI literature, the office automation research should be extended to more realistic office tasks which require to integrate various information sources in the office system and produce outputs through a series of decision-making processes. We introduce OfficeBench, one of the first office automation benchmarks for evaluating current LLM agents' capability to address office tasks in realistic office workflows. OfficeBench requires LLM agents to perform feasible long-horizon planning, proficiently switch between applications in a timely manner, and accurately ground their actions within a large combined action space, based on the contextual demands of the workflow. Applying our customized evaluation methods on each task, we find that GPT-4 Omni achieves the highest pass rate of 47.00%, demonstrating a decent performance in handling office tasks. However, this is still far below the human performance and accuracy standards required by real-world office workflows. We further observe that most issues are related to operation redundancy and hallucinations, as well as limitations in switching between multiple applications, which may provide valuable insights for developing effective agent frameworks for office automation.
Recent advancements in language and vision assistants have showcased impressive capabilities but suffer from a lack of transparency, limiting broader research and reproducibility. While open-source models handle general image tasks effectively, they face challenges with the high computational demands of complex visually-situated text understanding. Such tasks often require increased token inputs and large vision modules to harness high-resolution information. Striking a balance between model size and data importance remains an open question. This study aims to redefine the design of vision-language models by identifying key components and creating efficient models with constrained inference costs. By strategically formulating datasets, optimizing vision modules, and enhancing supervision techniques, we achieve significant improvements in inference throughput while maintaining high performance. Extensive experiments across models ranging from 160M to 13B parameters offer insights into model optimization. We will fully open-source our codebase, models, and datasets at https://github.com/naver-ai/elva.
In the domain of Document AI, parsing semi-structured image form is a crucial Key Information Extraction (KIE) task. The advent of pre-trained multimodal models significantly empowers Document AI frameworks to extract key information from form documents in different formats such as PDF, Word, and images. Nonetheless, form parsing is still encumbered by notable challenges like subpar capabilities in multilingual parsing and diminished recall in industrial contexts in rich text and rich visuals. In this work, we introduce a simple but effective \textbf{M}ultimodal and \textbf{M}ultilingual semi-structured \textbf{FORM} \textbf{PARSER} (\textbf{XFormParser}), which anchored on a comprehensive Transformer-based pre-trained language model and innovatively amalgamates semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE) into a unified framework. Combined with Bi-LSTM, the performance of multilingual parsing is significantly improved. Furthermore, we develop InDFormSFT, a pioneering supervised fine-tuning (SFT) industrial dataset that specifically addresses the parsing needs of forms in various industrial contexts. XFormParser has demonstrated its unparalleled effectiveness and robustness through rigorous testing on established benchmarks. Compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, XFormParser notably achieves up to 1.79\% F1 score improvement on RE tasks in language-specific settings. It also exhibits exceptional cross-task performance improvements in multilingual and zero-shot settings. The codes, datasets, and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/zhbuaa0/xformparser.
Document image restoration is a crucial aspect of Document AI systems, as the quality of document images significantly influences the overall performance. Prevailing methods address distinct restoration tasks independently, leading to intricate systems and the incapability to harness the potential synergies of multi-task learning. To overcome this challenge, we propose DocRes, a generalist model that unifies five document image restoration tasks including dewarping, deshadowing, appearance enhancement, deblurring, and binarization. To instruct DocRes to perform various restoration tasks, we propose a novel visual prompt approach called Dynamic Task-Specific Prompt (DTSPrompt). The DTSPrompt for different tasks comprises distinct prior features, which are additional characteristics extracted from the input image. Beyond its role as a cue for task-specific execution, DTSPrompt can also serve as supplementary information to enhance the model's performance. Moreover, DTSPrompt is more flexible than prior visual prompt approaches as it can be seamlessly applied and adapted to inputs with high and variable resolutions. Experimental results demonstrate that DocRes achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art task-specific models. This underscores the potential of DocRes across a broader spectrum of document image restoration tasks. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZZZHANG-jx/DocRes
Recently, leveraging large language models (LLMs) or multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document understanding has been proven very promising. However, previous works that employ LLMs/MLLMs for document understanding have not fully explored and utilized the document layout information, which is vital for precise document understanding. In this paper, we propose LayoutLLM, an LLM/MLLM based method for document understanding. The core of LayoutLLM is a layout instruction tuning strategy, which is specially designed to enhance the comprehension and utilization of document layouts. The proposed layout instruction tuning strategy consists of two components: Layout-aware Pre-training and Layout-aware Supervised Fine-tuning. To capture the characteristics of document layout in Layout-aware Pre-training, three groups of pre-training tasks, corresponding to document-level, region-level and segment-level information, are introduced. Furthermore, a novel module called layout chain-of-thought (LayoutCoT) is devised to enable LayoutLLM to focus on regions relevant to the question and generate accurate answers. LayoutCoT is effective for boosting the performance of document understanding. Meanwhile, it brings a certain degree of interpretability, which could facilitate manual inspection and correction. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that the proposed LayoutLLM significantly outperforms existing methods that adopt open-source 7B LLMs/MLLMs for document understanding. The training data of the LayoutLLM is publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/DocumentUnderstanding/LayoutLLM
The use of visually-rich documents (VRDs) in various fields has created a demand for Document AI models that can read and comprehend documents like humans, which requires the overcoming of technical, linguistic, and cognitive barriers. Unfortunately, the lack of appropriate datasets has significantly hindered advancements in the field. To address this issue, we introduce \textsc{DocTrack}, a VRD dataset really aligned with human eye-movement information using eye-tracking technology. This dataset can be used to investigate the challenges mentioned above. Additionally, we explore the impact of human reading order on document understanding tasks and examine what would happen if a machine reads in the same order as a human. Our results suggest that although Document AI models have made significant progress, they still have a long way to go before they can read VRDs as accurately, continuously, and flexibly as humans do. These findings have potential implications for future research and development of Document AI models. The data is available at \url{https://github.com/hint-lab/doctrack}.
In this report, we introduce DocXChain, a powerful open-source toolchain for document parsing, which is designed and developed to automatically convert the rich information embodied in unstructured documents, such as text, tables and charts, into structured representations that are readable and manipulable by machines. Specifically, basic capabilities, including text detection, text recognition, table structure recognition and layout analysis, are provided. Upon these basic capabilities, we also build a set of fully functional pipelines for document parsing, i.e., general text reading, table parsing, and document structurization, to drive various applications related to documents in real-world scenarios. Moreover, DocXChain is concise, modularized and flexible, such that it can be readily integrated with existing tools, libraries or models (such as LangChain and ChatGPT), to construct more powerful systems that can accomplish more complicated and challenging tasks. The code of DocXChain is publicly available at:~\url{https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/Applications/DocXChain}
Document AI aims to automatically analyze documents by leveraging natural language processing and computer vision techniques. One of the major tasks of Document AI is document layout analysis, which structures document pages by interpreting the content and spatial relationships of layout, image, and text. This task can be image-centric, wherein the aim is to identify and label various regions such as authors and paragraphs, or text-centric, where the focus is on classifying individual words in a document. Although there are increasingly sophisticated methods for improving layout analysis, doubts remain about the extent to which their findings can be generalized to a broader context. Specifically, prior work developed systems based on very different architectures, such as transformer-based, graph-based, and CNNs. However, no work has mentioned the effectiveness of these models in a comparative analysis. Moreover, while language-independent Document AI models capable of knowledge transfer have been developed, it remains to be investigated to what degree they can effectively transfer knowledge. In this study, we aim to fill these gaps by conducting a comparative evaluation of state-of-the-art models in document layout analysis and investigating the potential of cross-lingual layout analysis by utilizing machine translation techniques.
Document pre-trained models and grid-based models have proven to be very effective on various tasks in Document AI. However, for the document layout analysis (DLA) task, existing document pre-trained models, even those pre-trained in a multi-modal fashion, usually rely on either textual features or visual features. Grid-based models for DLA are multi-modality but largely neglect the effect of pre-training. To fully leverage multi-modal information and exploit pre-training techniques to learn better representation for DLA, in this paper, we present VGT, a two-stream Vision Grid Transformer, in which Grid Transformer (GiT) is proposed and pre-trained for 2D token-level and segment-level semantic understanding. Furthermore, a new dataset named D$^4$LA, which is so far the most diverse and detailed manually-annotated benchmark for document layout analysis, is curated and released. Experiment results have illustrated that the proposed VGT model achieves new state-of-the-art results on DLA tasks, e.g. PubLayNet ($95.7\%$$\rightarrow$$96.2\%$), DocBank ($79.6\%$$\rightarrow$$84.1\%$), and D$^4$LA ($67.7\%$$\rightarrow$$68.8\%$). The code and models as well as the D$^4$LA dataset will be made publicly available ~\url{https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery}.
We address the extraction of mathematical statements and their proofs from scholarly PDF articles as a multimodal classification problem, utilizing text, font features, and bitmap image renderings of PDFs as distinct modalities. We propose a modular sequential multimodal machine learning approach specifically designed for extracting theorem-like environments and proofs. This is based on a cross-modal attention mechanism to generate multimodal paragraph embeddings, which are then fed into our novel multimodal sliding window transformer architecture to capture sequential information across paragraphs. Our document AI methodology stands out as it eliminates the need for OCR preprocessing, LaTeX sources during inference, or custom pre-training on specialized losses to understand cross-modality relationships. Unlike many conventional approaches that operate at a single-page level, ours can be directly applied to multi-page PDFs and seamlessly handles the page breaks often found in lengthy scientific mathematical documents. Our approach demonstrates performance improvements obtained by transitioning from unimodality to multimodality, and finally by incorporating sequential modeling over paragraphs.
We call on the Document AI (DocAI) community to reevaluate current methodologies and embrace the challenge of creating more practically-oriented benchmarks. Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE) seeks to remediate the halted research progress in understanding visually-rich documents (VRDs). We present a new dataset with novelties related to types of questions, answers, and document layouts based on multi-industry, multi-domain, and multi-page VRDs of various origins, and dates. Moreover, we are pushing the boundaries of current methods by creating multi-task and multi-domain evaluation setups that more accurately simulate real-world situations where powerful generalization and adaptation under low-resource settings are desired. DUDE aims to set a new standard as a more practical, long-standing benchmark for the community, and we hope that it will lead to future extensions and contributions that address real-world challenges. Finally, our work illustrates the importance of finding more efficient ways to model language, images, and layout in DocAI.
As a prerequisite of chart data extraction, the accurate detection of chart basic elements is essential and mandatory. In contrast to object detection in the general image domain, chart element detection relies heavily on context information as charts are highly structured data visualization formats. To address this, we propose a novel method CACHED, which stands for Context-Aware Chart Element Detection, by integrating a local-global context fusion module consisting of visual context enhancement and positional context encoding with the Cascade R-CNN framework. To improve the generalization of our method for broader applicability, we refine the existing chart element categorization and standardized 18 classes for chart basic elements, excluding plot elements. Our CACHED method, with the updated category of chart elements, achieves state-of-the-art performance in our experiments, underscoring the importance of context in chart element detection. Extending our method to the bar plot detection task, we obtain the best result on the PMC test dataset.
Visual information extraction (VIE) plays an important role in Document Intelligence. Generally, it is divided into two tasks: semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE). Recently, pre-trained models for documents have achieved substantial progress in VIE, particularly in SER. However, most of the existing models learn the geometric representation in an implicit way, which has been found insufficient for the RE task since geometric information is especially crucial for RE. Moreover, we reveal another factor that limits the performance of RE lies in the objective gap between the pre-training phase and the fine-tuning phase for RE. To tackle these issues, we propose in this paper a multi-modal framework, named GeoLayoutLM, for VIE. GeoLayoutLM explicitly models the geometric relations in pre-training, which we call geometric pre-training. Geometric pre-training is achieved by three specially designed geometry-related pre-training tasks. Additionally, novel relation heads, which are pre-trained by the geometric pre-training tasks and fine-tuned for RE, are elaborately designed to enrich and enhance the feature representation. According to extensive experiments on standard VIE benchmarks, GeoLayoutLM achieves highly competitive scores in the SER task and significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-arts for RE (\eg, the F1 score of RE on FUNSD is boosted from 80.35\% to 89.45\%). The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/DocumentUnderstanding/GeoLayoutLM
Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable results in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks with in-context learning, which involves inference based on a few demonstration examples. Despite their successes in NLP tasks, no investigation has been conducted to assess the ability of LLMs to perform document information extraction (DIE) using in-context learning. Applying LLMs to DIE poses two challenges: the modality and task gap. To this end, we propose a simple but effective in-context learning framework called ICL-D3IE, which enables LLMs to perform DIE with different types of demonstration examples. Specifically, we extract the most difficult and distinct segments from hard training documents as hard demonstrations for benefiting all test instances. We design demonstrations describing relationships that enable LLMs to understand positional relationships. We introduce formatting demonstrations for easy answer extraction. Additionally, the framework improves diverse demonstrations by updating them iteratively. Our experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the ICL-D3IE framework enables Davinci-003/ChatGPT to achieve superior performance when compared to previous pre-trained methods fine-tuned with full training in both the in-distribution (ID) setting and in the out-of-distribution (OOD) setting. Code is available at https://github.com/MAEHCM/ICL-D3IE.
We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using innovative self-supervised objectives and diverse labeled data. UDOP also learns to generate document images from text and layout modalities via masked image reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in the field of document AI that one model simultaneously achieves high-quality neural document editing and content customization. Our method sets the state-of-the-art on 8 Document AI tasks, e.g., document understanding and QA, across diverse data domains like finance reports, academic papers, and websites. UDOP ranks first on the leaderboard of the Document Understanding Benchmark.
Business documents come in a variety of structures, formats and information needs which makes information extraction a challenging task. Due to these variations, having a document generic model which can work well across all types of documents and for all the use cases seems far-fetched. For document-specific models, we would need customized document-specific labels. We introduce DoSA (Document Specific Automated Annotations), which helps annotators in generating initial annotations automatically using our novel bootstrap approach by leveraging document generic datasets and models. These initial annotations can further be reviewed by a human for correctness. An initial document-specific model can be trained and its inference can be used as feedback for generating more automated annotations. These automated annotations can be reviewed by human-in-the-loop for the correctness and a new improved model can be trained using the current model as pre-trained model before going for the next iteration. In this paper, our scope is limited to Form like documents due to limited availability of generic annotated datasets, but this idea can be extended to a variety of other documents as more datasets are built. An open-source ready-to-use implementation is made available on GitHub https://github.com/neeleshkshukla/DoSA.
The processing of Visually-Rich Documents (VRDs) is highly important in information extraction tasks associated with Document Intelligence. We introduce DI-Metrics, a Python library devoted to VRD model evaluation comprising text-based, geometric-based and hierarchical metrics for information extraction tasks. We apply DI-Metrics to evaluate information extraction performance using publicly available CORD dataset, comparing performance of three SOTA models and one industry model. The open-source library is available on GitHub.
Self-supervised pre-training techniques have achieved remarkable progress in Document AI. Most multimodal pre-trained models use a masked language modeling objective to learn bidirectional representations on the text modality, but they differ in pre-training objectives for the image modality. This discrepancy adds difficulty to multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we propose \textbf{LayoutLMv3} to pre-train multimodal Transformers for Document AI with unified text and image masking. Additionally, LayoutLMv3 is pre-trained with a word-patch alignment objective to learn cross-modal alignment by predicting whether the corresponding image patch of a text word is masked. The simple unified architecture and training objectives make LayoutLMv3 a general-purpose pre-trained model for both text-centric and image-centric Document AI tasks. Experimental results show that LayoutLMv3 achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in text-centric tasks, including form understanding, receipt understanding, and document visual question answering, but also in image-centric tasks such as document image classification and document layout analysis. The code and models are publicly available at \url{https://aka.ms/layoutlmv3}.