In recent years, the challenge of extracting information from business documents has emerged as a critical task, finding applications across numerous domains. This effort has attracted substantial interest from both industry and academy, highlighting its significance in the current technological landscape. Most datasets in this area are primarily focused on Key Information Extraction (KIE), where the extraction process revolves around extracting information using a specific, predefined set of keys. Unlike most existing datasets and benchmarks, our focus is on discovering key-value pairs (KVPs) without relying on predefined keys, navigating through an array of diverse templates and complex layouts. This task presents unique challenges, primarily due to the absence of comprehensive datasets and benchmarks tailored for non-predetermined KVP extraction. To address this gap, we introduce KVP10k , a new dataset and benchmark specifically designed for KVP extraction. The dataset contains 10707 richly annotated images. In our benchmark, we also introduce a new challenging task that combines elements of KIE as well as KVP in a single task. KVP10k sets itself apart with its extensive diversity in data and richly detailed annotations, paving the way for advancements in the field of information extraction from complex business documents.
Existing methods for Visual Information Extraction (VIE) from form-like documents typically fragment the process into separate subtasks, such as key information extraction, key-value pair extraction, and choice group extraction. However, these approaches often overlook the hierarchical structure of form documents, including hierarchical key-value pairs and hierarchical choice groups. To address these limitations, we present a new perspective, reframing VIE as a relation prediction problem and unifying labels of different tasks into a single label space. This unified approach allows for the definition of various relation types and effectively tackles hierarchical relationships in form-like documents. In line with this perspective, we present UniVIE, a unified model that addresses the VIE problem comprehensively. UniVIE functions using a coarse-to-fine strategy. It initially generates tree proposals through a tree proposal network, which are subsequently refined into hierarchical trees by a relation decoder module. To enhance the relation prediction capabilities of UniVIE, we incorporate two novel tree constraints into the relation decoder: a tree attention mask and a tree level embedding. Extensive experimental evaluations on both our in-house dataset HierForms and a publicly available dataset SIBR, substantiate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, underscoring the effectiveness and potential of our unified approach in advancing the field of VIE.
Document pair extraction aims to identify key and value entities as well as their relationships from visually-rich documents. Most existing methods divide it into two separate tasks: semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE). However, simply concatenating SER and RE serially can lead to severe error propagation, and it fails to handle cases like multi-line entities in real scenarios. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel framework, PEneo (Pair Extraction new decoder option), which performs document pair extraction in a unified pipeline, incorporating three concurrent sub-tasks: line extraction, line grouping, and entity linking. This approach alleviates the error accumulation problem and can handle the case of multi-line entities. Furthermore, to better evaluate the model's performance and to facilitate future research on pair extraction, we introduce RFUND, a re-annotated version of the commonly used FUNSD and XFUND datasets, to make them more accurate and cover realistic situations. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate PEneo's superiority over previous pipelines, boosting the performance by a large margin (e.g., 19.89%-22.91% F1 score on RFUND-EN) when combined with various backbones like LiLT and LayoutLMv3, showing its effectiveness and generality. Codes and the new annotations are available at https://github.com/ZeningLin/PEneo.
Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs), in which named entity recognition (NER) is treated as a sequence-labeling task of predicting the BIO entity tags for tokens, following the typical setting of NLP. However, BIO-tagging scheme relies on the correct order of model inputs, which is not guaranteed in real-world NER on scanned VrDs where text are recognized and arranged by OCR systems. Such reading order issue hinders the accurate marking of entities by BIO-tagging scheme, making it impossible for sequence-labeling methods to predict correct named entities. To address the reading order issue, we introduce Token Path Prediction (TPP), a simple prediction head to predict entity mentions as token sequences within documents. Alternative to token classification, TPP models the document layout as a complete directed graph of tokens, and predicts token paths within the graph as entities. For better evaluation of VrD-NER systems, we also propose two revised benchmark datasets of NER on scanned documents which can reflect real-world scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and suggest its potential to be a universal solution to various information extraction tasks on documents.
The rapid growth of web pages and the increasing complexity of their structure poses a challenge for web mining models. Web mining models are required to understand the semi-structured web pages, particularly when little is known about the subject or template of a new page. Current methods migrate language models to the web mining by embedding the XML source code into the transformer or encoding the rendered layout with graph neural networks. However, these approaches do not take into account the relationships between text nodes within and across pages. In this paper, we propose a new approach, ReXMiner, for zero-shot relation extraction in web mining. ReXMiner encodes the shortest relative paths in the Document Object Model (DOM) tree which is a more accurate and efficient signal for key-value pair extraction within a web page. It also incorporates the popularity of each text node by counting the occurrence of the same text node across different web pages. We use the contrastive learning to address the issue of sparsity in relation extraction. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that our method, ReXMiner, outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the task of zero-shot relation extraction in web mining.
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
In this paper, we present a new question-answering (QA) based key-value pair extraction approach, called KVPFormer, to robustly extracting key-value relationships between entities from form-like document images. Specifically, KVPFormer first identifies key entities from all entities in an image with a Transformer encoder, then takes these key entities as \textbf{questions} and feeds them into a Transformer decoder to predict their corresponding \textbf{answers} (i.e., value entities) in parallel. To achieve higher answer prediction accuracy, we propose a coarse-to-fine answer prediction approach further, which first extracts multiple answer candidates for each identified question in the coarse stage and then selects the most likely one among these candidates in the fine stage. In this way, the learning difficulty of answer prediction can be effectively reduced so that the prediction accuracy can be improved. Moreover, we introduce a spatial compatibility attention bias into the self-attention/cross-attention mechanism for \Ours{} to better model the spatial interactions between entities. With these new techniques, our proposed \Ours{} achieves state-of-the-art results on FUNSD and XFUND datasets, outperforming the previous best-performing method by 7.2\% and 13.2\% in F1 score, respectively.
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}.
Structured document understanding has attracted considerable attention and made significant progress recently, owing to its crucial role in intelligent document processing. However, most existing related models can only deal with the document data of specific language(s) (typically English) included in the pre-training collection, which is extremely limited. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective Language-independent Layout Transformer (LiLT) for structured document understanding. LiLT can be pre-trained on the structured documents of a single language and then directly fine-tuned on other languages with the corresponding off-the-shelf monolingual/multilingual pre-trained textual models. Experimental results on eight languages have shown that LiLT can achieve competitive or even superior performance on diverse widely-used downstream benchmarks, which enables language-independent benefit from the pre-training of document layout structure. Code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/jpWang/LiLT.
Understanding document images (e.g., invoices) is a core but challenging task since it requires complex functions such as reading text and a holistic understanding of the document. Current Visual Document Understanding (VDU) methods outsource the task of reading text to off-the-shelf Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines and focus on the understanding task with the OCR outputs. Although such OCR-based approaches have shown promising performance, they suffer from 1) high computational costs for using OCR; 2) inflexibility of OCR models on languages or types of document; 3) OCR error propagation to the subsequent process. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce a novel OCR-free VDU model named Donut, which stands for Document understanding transformer. As the first step in OCR-free VDU research, we propose a simple architecture (i.e., Transformer) with a pre-training objective (i.e., cross-entropy loss). Donut is conceptually simple yet effective. Through extensive experiments and analyses, we show a simple OCR-free VDU model, Donut, achieves state-of-the-art performances on various VDU tasks in terms of both speed and accuracy. In addition, we offer a synthetic data generator that helps the model pre-training to be flexible in various languages and domains. The code, trained model and synthetic data are available at https://github.com/clovaai/donut.
Multimodal pre-training with text, layout, and image has achieved SOTA performance for visually-rich document understanding tasks recently, which demonstrates the great potential for joint learning across different modalities. In this paper, we present LayoutXLM, a multimodal pre-trained model for multilingual document understanding, which aims to bridge the language barriers for visually-rich document understanding. To accurately evaluate LayoutXLM, we also introduce a multilingual form understanding benchmark dataset named XFUND, which includes form understanding samples in 7 languages (Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese), and key-value pairs are manually labeled for each language. Experiment results show that the LayoutXLM model has significantly outperformed the existing SOTA cross-lingual pre-trained models on the XFUND dataset. The pre-trained LayoutXLM model and the XFUND dataset are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutxlm.
Pre-training of text and layout has proved effective in a variety of visually-rich document understanding tasks due to its effective model architecture and the advantage of large-scale unlabeled scanned/digital-born documents. We propose LayoutLMv2 architecture with new pre-training tasks to model the interaction among text, layout, and image in a single multi-modal framework. Specifically, with a two-stream multi-modal Transformer encoder, LayoutLMv2 uses not only the existing masked visual-language modeling task but also the new text-image alignment and text-image matching tasks, which make it better capture the cross-modality interaction in the pre-training stage. Meanwhile, it also integrates a spatial-aware self-attention mechanism into the Transformer architecture so that the model can fully understand the relative positional relationship among different text blocks. Experiment results show that LayoutLMv2 outperforms LayoutLM by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of downstream visually-rich document understanding tasks, including FUNSD (0.7895 $\to$ 0.8420), CORD (0.9493 $\to$ 0.9601), SROIE (0.9524 $\to$ 0.9781), Kleister-NDA (0.8340 $\to$ 0.8520), RVL-CDIP (0.9443 $\to$ 0.9564), and DocVQA (0.7295 $\to$ 0.8672). We made our model and code publicly available at \url{https://aka.ms/layoutlmv2}.