Daily Papers

Slide design requires personalizing both deck themes and page layouts. Yet, current AI agent-based methods struggle with fine-grained, page-level design. Solely relying on prespecified templates or user verbose instructions, they fail to capture latent design intents, leaving Page-level Slide Personalization (PSP) unresolved. To close this gap, this work formulates PSP as an inverse planning problem. We propose to learn a design intent without assuming any knowledge of the specific executing tools (e.g., PowerPoint, Beamer) being used. However, relinquishing control over these tools makes the problem intractable to optimize end-to-end. To overcome this, we propose SPIRE, a principled framework to solve PSP approximately. By intentionally corrupting the visual structures of clean slides, SPIRE creates a verifiable task to denoise the corruption, whereby two agents learn to collaboratively refine executable designs via reinforcement learning (RL). We present a proof that structural denoising is a consistent surrogate for PSP, and that the multi-agent formulation strictly reduces policy gradient variance in RL. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SPIRE.

The KV cache is a dominant memory bottleneck for LLM inference. While 4-bit KV quantization preserves accuracy, 2-bit often degrades it, especially on long-context reasoning. We close this gap via an algorithm-system co-design for mixed-precision KV caching: Kitty. On the algorithm side, extensive experiments show that Dynamic Channel-wise Precision Boost -- which ranks Key-cache channels by sensitivity and keeps only a small fraction at higher precision -- maintains near-zero loss in accuracy drop while approaching 2-bit memory. The main challenge is handling dynamic 4-bit channel boosts while keeping the page layout coalesced and the dequantization uniform, with no scattered reads or hard-coded masks. Kitty addresses these issues by decompose each mixed-precision Key page into two tensors with unified 2-bit precision. Based on this, Kitty provides a page-centric KV layout, Triton-compatible page dequantization kernels, and a lightweight runtime pipeline that preserves coalescing and avoids divergence. Across seven tasks and two model families (Qwen3, LLaMA3), Kitty cuts KV memory by nearly 8x with negligible accuracy loss, enabling up to 8x larger batches and 2.1x-4.1x higher throughput under the same memory budget. We release the full implementation of Kitty at https://github.com/Summer-Summer/Kitty.

Currently, the integration of mobile Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is ubiquitous in most people's daily lives. And the ongoing evolution of multimodal large-scale models, such as GPT-4v, Qwen-VL-Max, has significantly bolstered the capabilities of GUI comprehension and user action analysis, showcasing the potentiality of intelligent GUI assistants. However, current GUI Agents often need to access page layout information through calling system APIs, which may pose privacy risks. Fixing GUI (such as mobile interfaces) to a certain low resolution might result in the loss of fine-grained image details. At the same time, the multimodal large models built for GUI Agents currently have poor understanding and decision-making abilities for Chinese GUI interfaces, making them difficult to apply to a large number of Chinese apps. This paper introduces MobileFlow, a multimodal large language model meticulously crafted for mobile GUI agents. Transforming from the open-source model Qwen-VL-Chat into GUI domain, MobileFlow contains approximately 21 billion parameters and is equipped with novel hybrid visual encoders, making it possible for variable resolutions of image inputs and good support for multilingual GUI. By incorporating Mixture of Experts (MoE) expansions and pioneering alignment training strategies, MobileFlow has the capacity to fully interpret image data and comprehend user instructions for GUI interaction tasks. Finally, MobileFlow outperforms Qwen-VL-Max and GPT-4v in terms of task execution by GUI agents on both public and our proposed evaluation metrics, and has been successfully deployed in real-world business contexts, proving its effectiveness for practical applications.

Documents are visually rich structures that convey information through text, as well as tables, figures, page layouts, or fonts. While modern document retrieval systems exhibit strong performance on query-to-text matching, they struggle to exploit visual cues efficiently, hindering their performance on practical document retrieval applications such as Retrieval Augmented Generation. To benchmark current systems on visually rich document retrieval, we introduce the Visual Document Retrieval Benchmark ViDoRe, composed of various page-level retrieving tasks spanning multiple domains, languages, and settings. The inherent shortcomings of modern systems motivate the introduction of a new retrieval model architecture, ColPali, which leverages the document understanding capabilities of recent Vision Language Models to produce high-quality contextualized embeddings solely from images of document pages. Combined with a late interaction matching mechanism, ColPali largely outperforms modern document retrieval pipelines while being drastically faster and end-to-end trainable.

In the evolving field of corporate sustainability, analyzing unstructured Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports is a complex challenge due to their varied formats and intricate content. This study introduces an innovative methodology utilizing the "Unstructured Core Library", specifically tailored to address these challenges by transforming ESG reports into structured, analyzable formats. Our approach significantly advances the existing research by offering high-precision text cleaning, adept identification and extraction of text from images, and standardization of tables within these reports. Emphasizing its capability to handle diverse data types, including text, images, and tables, the method adeptly manages the nuances of differing page layouts and report styles across industries. This research marks a substantial contribution to the fields of industrial ecology and corporate sustainability assessment, paving the way for the application of advanced NLP technologies and large language models in the analysis of corporate governance and sustainability. Our code is available at https://github.com/linancn/TianGong-AI-Unstructure.git.

Multi-modal document retrieval is designed to identify and retrieve various forms of multi-modal content, such as figures, tables, charts, and layout information from extensive documents. Despite its significance, there is a notable lack of a robust benchmark to effectively evaluate the performance of systems in multi-modal document retrieval. To address this gap, this work introduces a new benchmark, named as MMDocIR, encompassing two distinct tasks: page-level and layout-level retrieval. The former focuses on localizing the most relevant pages within a long document, while the latter targets the detection of specific layouts, offering a more fine-grained granularity than whole-page analysis. A layout can refer to a variety of elements such as textual paragraphs, equations, figures, tables, or charts. The MMDocIR benchmark comprises a rich dataset featuring expertly annotated labels for 1,685 questions and bootstrapped labels for 173,843 questions, making it a pivotal resource for advancing multi-modal document retrieval for both training and evaluation. Through rigorous experiments, we reveal that (i) visual retrievers significantly outperform their text counterparts, (ii) MMDocIR train set can effectively benefit the training process of multi-modal document retrieval and (iii) text retrievers leveraging on VLM-text perform much better than those using OCR-text. These findings underscores the potential advantages of integrating visual elements for multi-modal document retrieval.

Despite the remarkable progress in text-to-video models, achieving precise control over text elements and animated graphics remains a significant challenge, especially in applications such as video advertisements. To address this limitation, we introduce Animated Layout Generation, a novel approach to extend static graphic layouts with temporal dynamics. We propose a Structured Text Representation for fine-grained video control through hierarchical visual elements. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we present VAKER (Video Ad maKER), a text-to-video advertisement generation pipeline that combines a three-stage generation process with Unstructured Text Reasoning for seamless integration with LLMs. VAKER fully automates video advertisement generation by incorporating dynamic layout trajectories for objects and graphics across specific video frames. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that VAKER significantly outperforms existing methods in generating video advertisements. Project Page: https://yeonsangshin.github.io/projects/Vaker

We propose a diffusion-based approach for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation with interactive 3D layout control. Layout control has been widely studied to alleviate the shortcomings of T2I diffusion models in understanding objects' placement and relationships from text descriptions. Nevertheless, existing approaches for layout control are limited to 2D layouts, require the user to provide a static layout beforehand, and fail to preserve generated images under layout changes. This makes these approaches unsuitable for applications that require 3D object-wise control and iterative refinements, e.g., interior design and complex scene generation. To this end, we leverage the recent advancements in depth-conditioned T2I models and propose a novel approach for interactive 3D layout control. We replace the traditional 2D boxes used in layout control with 3D boxes. Furthermore, we revamp the T2I task as a multi-stage generation process, where at each stage, the user can insert, change, and move an object in 3D while preserving objects from earlier stages. We achieve this through our proposed Dynamic Self-Attention (DSA) module and the consistent 3D object translation strategy. Experiments show that our approach can generate complicated scenes based on 3D layouts, boosting the object generation success rate over the standard depth-conditioned T2I methods by 2x. Moreover, it outperforms other methods in comparison in preserving objects under layout changes. Project Page: https://abdo-eldesokey.github.io/build-a-scene/

As global cross-lingual communication intensifies, language barriers in visually rich documents such as PDFs remain a practical bottleneck. Existing document translation pipelines face a tension between linguistic processing and layout preservation: text-oriented Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) systems often discard structural metadata, while document parsers focus on extraction and do not support faithful re-rendering after translation. We introduce BabelDOC, an Intermediate Representation (IR)-based framework for layout-preserving PDF translation. BabelDOC decouples visual layout metadata from semantic content, enabling document-level translation operations such as terminology extraction, cross-page context handling, glossary-constrained generation, and formula placeholdering. The translated content is then re-anchored to the original layout through an adaptive typesetting engine. Experiments on a curated 200-page benchmark, together with human evaluation and multimodal LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, show that BabelDOC improves layout fidelity, visual aesthetics, and terminology consistency over representative baselines, while maintaining competitive translation precision. The open-source toolkit and its interactive downstream applications are publicly available and have attracted over 8.4K GitHub stars and 17 contributors at the time of writing. A demonstration video is also available.

Accurate document layout analysis is a key requirement for high-quality PDF document conversion. With the recent availability of public, large ground-truth datasets such as PubLayNet and DocBank, deep-learning models have proven to be very effective at layout detection and segmentation. While these datasets are of adequate size to train such models, they severely lack in layout variability since they are sourced from scientific article repositories such as PubMed and arXiv only. Consequently, the accuracy of the layout segmentation drops significantly when these models are applied on more challenging and diverse layouts. In this paper, we present DocLayNet, a new, publicly available, document-layout annotation dataset in COCO format. It contains 80863 manually annotated pages from diverse data sources to represent a wide variability in layouts. For each PDF page, the layout annotations provide labelled bounding-boxes with a choice of 11 distinct classes. DocLayNet also provides a subset of double- and triple-annotated pages to determine the inter-annotator agreement. In multiple experiments, we provide baseline accuracy scores (in mAP) for a set of popular object detection models. We also demonstrate that these models fall approximately 10\% behind the inter-annotator agreement. Furthermore, we provide evidence that DocLayNet is of sufficient size. Lastly, we compare models trained on PubLayNet, DocBank and DocLayNet, showing that layout predictions of the DocLayNet-trained models are more robust and thus the preferred choice for general-purpose document-layout analysis.

Current story visualization methods tend to position subjects solely by text and face challenges in maintaining artistic consistency. To address these limitations, we introduce DreamingComics, a layout-aware story visualization framework. We build upon a pretrained video diffusion-transformer (DiT) model, leveraging its spatiotemporal priors to enhance identity and style consistency. For layout-based position control, we propose RegionalRoPE, a region-aware positional encoding scheme that re-indexes embeddings based on the target layout. Additionally, we introduce a masked condition loss to further constrain each subject's visual features to their designated region. To infer layouts from natural language scripts, we integrate an LLM-based layout generator trained to produce comic-style layouts, enabling flexible and controllable layout conditioning. We present a comprehensive evaluation of our approach, showing a 29.2% increase in character consistency and a 36.2% increase in style similarity compared to previous methods, while displaying high spatial accuracy. Our project page is available at https://yj7082126.github.io/dreamingcomics/

Classical OCR pipelines decompose document reading into detection, segmentation, and recognition stages, which makes them sensitive to localization errors and difficult to extend to interactive querying. This work investigates whether a single compact model can jointly perform text recognition and spatial grounding on both handwritten and printed documents. We introduce PILOT, a 155M-parameter prompt-conditioned generative model that formulates document OCR as unified sequence generation. A lightweight depthwise-separable CNN encodes the page, and a Transformer decoder autoregressively emits a single stream of subword and quantized absolute-coordinate tokens on a 10\,px grid, enabling full-page OCR, region-conditioned reading, and query-by-string spotting within the same architecture. A three-stage curriculum, progressing from plain transcription to joint text-and-box generation and finally to prompt-controlled extraction, stabilizes training and improves spatial grounding. Experiments on IAM, RIMES~2009, SROIE~2019, and the heterogeneous MAURDOR benchmark show that PILOT achieves competitive or superior performance in text recognition and line-level detection compared with traditional OCR systems, recent end-to-end HTR models, and compact vision--language models, while remaining substantially smaller than billion-scale multimodal models. Additional evaluations on fine-grained OCR and query-by-string spotting further confirm that a unified text--layout decoder can provide accurate and efficient promptable OCR in a compact setting. To support reproducibility, we release the synthetic SROIE generator, the 500k annotated IDL/PDFA pages, the harmonized line-level annotations for IAM, RIMES~2009, and MAURDOR, and the source code at https://github.com/hamdilaziz/PILOT.

Document understanding with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) requires not only accurate answers but also explicit, evidence-grounded reasoning, especially in high-stakes scenarios. However, current document MLLMs still fall short of forming a complete, human-like reasoning process, because even when they improve both layout encoding and CoT-style prompting, the interaction between the two is typically learned implicitly and remains loosely coupled rather than being enforced as a systematic mechanism. So we propose DocCogito, a unified framework that integrates global layout perception with structured, region-grounded reasoning. DocCogito introduces a lightweight layout tower that distills page structure into learnable global layout prior tokens, and a deterministic Visual-Semantic Chain (VSC)-a concise structured representation less ambiguous than free-form natural-language CoT-to supervise fine-grained intermediate reasoning aligned with evidence regions. Training follows a progressive recipe, including layout perception pretraining, VSC-guided cold start, rejection sampling, and GRPO. To further strengthen the internal coupling between layout priors and VSC execution, we augment standard rewards with a fine-grained region-confidence signal that encourages reasoning traces to stay aligned with corresponding evidence regions. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks (DocVQA, WTQ, ChartQA, TextVQA, OCRBench, and InfoVQA) demonstrate strong generalization, achieving state-of-the-art results on four benchmarks.

In this paper, we study the content-aware layout generation problem, which aims to automatically generate layouts that are harmonious with a given background image. Existing methods usually deal with this task with a single-step reasoning framework. The lack of a feedback-based self-correction mechanism leads to their failure rates significantly increasing when faced with complex element layout planning. To address this challenge, we introduce SEGA, a novel Stepwise Evolution Paradigm for Content-Aware Layout Generation. Inspired by the systematic mode of human thinking, SEGA employs a hierarchical reasoning framework with a coarse-to-fine strategy: first, a coarse-level module roughly estimates the layout planning results; then, another refining module performs fine-level reasoning regarding the coarse planning results. Furthermore, we incorporate layout design principles as prior knowledge into the model to enhance its layout planning ability. Besides, we present GenPoster-100K that is a new large-scale poster dataset with rich meta-information annotation. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by achieving the state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmark datasets. Our project page is at: https://brucew91.github.io/SEGA.github.io/

Current digital human studies focusing on lip-syncing and body movement are no longer sufficient to meet the growing industrial demand, while human video generation techniques that support interacting with real-world environments (e.g., objects) have not been well investigated. Despite human hand synthesis already being an intricate problem, generating objects in contact with hands and their interactions presents an even more challenging task, especially when the objects exhibit obvious variations in size and shape. To tackle these issues, we present a novel video Reenactment framework focusing on Human-Object Interaction (HOI) via an adaptive Layout-instructed Diffusion model (Re-HOLD). Our key insight is to employ specialized layout representation for hands and objects, respectively. Such representations enable effective disentanglement of hand modeling and object adaptation to diverse motion sequences. To further improve the generation quality of HOI, we design an interactive textural enhancement module for both hands and objects by introducing two independent memory banks. We also propose a layout adjustment strategy for the cross-object reenactment scenario to adaptively adjust unreasonable layouts caused by diverse object sizes during inference. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods. Project page: https://fyycs.github.io/Re-HOLD.

We introduce 3D-FRONT (3D Furnished Rooms with layOuts and semaNTics), a new, large-scale, and comprehensive repository of synthetic indoor scenes highlighted by professionally designed layouts and a large number of rooms populated by high-quality textured 3D models with style compatibility. From layout semantics down to texture details of individual objects, our dataset is freely available to the academic community and beyond. Currently, 3D-FRONT contains 18,968 rooms diversely furnished by 3D objects, far surpassing all publicly available scene datasets. In addition, the 13,151 furniture objects all come with high-quality textures. While the floorplans and layout designs are directly sourced from professional creations, the interior designs in terms of furniture styles, color, and textures have been carefully curated based on a recommender system we develop to attain consistent styles as expert designs. Furthermore, we release Trescope, a light-weight rendering tool, to support benchmark rendering of 2D images and annotations from 3D-FRONT. We demonstrate two applications, interior scene synthesis and texture synthesis, that are especially tailored to the strengths of our new dataset. The project page is at: https://tianchi.aliyun.com/specials/promotion/alibaba-3d-scene-dataset.

Document Layout analysis (DLA), is the process by which a page is parsed into meaningful elements, often using machine learning models. Typically, the quality of a model is judged using general object detection metrics such as IoU, F1 or mAP. However, these metrics are designed for images that are 2D projections of 3D space, not for the natively 2D imagery of printed media. This discrepancy can result in misleading or uninformative interpretation of model performance by the metrics. To encourage more robust, comparable, and nuanced DLA, we introduce: The Structural Semantic Unit (SSU) a relational labelling approach that shifts the focus from the physical to the semantic structure of the content; and the Coverage, Overlap, Trespass, and Excess (COTe) score, a decomposable metric for measuring page parsing quality. We demonstrate the value of these methods through case studies and by evaluating 5 common DLA models on 3 DLA datasets. We show that the COTe score is more informative than traditional metrics and reveals distinct failure modes across models, such as breaching semantic boundaries or repeatedly parsing the same region. In addition, the COTe score reduces the interpretation-performance gap by up to 76% relative to the F1. Notably, we find that the COTe's granularity robustness largely holds even without explicit SSU labelling, lowering the barriers to entry for using the system. Finally, we release an SSU labelled dataset and a Python library for applying COTe in DLA projects.

Question answering over visually rich documents (VRDs) requires reasoning not only over isolated content but also over documents' structural organization and cross-page dependencies. However, conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encode content in isolated chunks during ingestion, losing structural and cross-page dependencies, and retrieve a fixed number of pages at inference, regardless of the specific demands of the question or context. This often results in incomplete evidence retrieval and degraded answer quality for multi-page reasoning tasks. To address these limitations, we propose LAD-RAG, a novel Layout-Aware Dynamic RAG framework. During ingestion, LAD-RAG constructs a symbolic document graph that captures layout structure and cross-page dependencies, adding it alongside standard neural embeddings to yield a more holistic representation of the document. During inference, an LLM agent dynamically interacts with the neural and symbolic indices to adaptively retrieve the necessary evidence based on the query. Experiments on MMLongBench-Doc, LongDocURL, DUDE, and MP-DocVQA demonstrate that LAD-RAG improves retrieval, achieving over 90% perfect recall on average without any top-k tuning, and outperforming baseline retrievers by up to 20% in recall at comparable noise levels, yielding higher QA accuracy with minimal latency.

Document Layout Analysis, which is the task of identifying different semantic regions inside of a document page, is a subject of great interest for both computer scientists and humanities scholars as it represents a fundamental step towards further analysis tasks for the former and a powerful tool to improve and facilitate the study of the documents for the latter. However, many of the works currently present in the literature, especially when it comes to the available datasets, fail to meet the needs of both worlds and, in particular, tend to lean towards the needs and common practices of the computer science side, leading to resources that are not representative of the humanities real needs. For this reason, the present paper introduces U-DIADS-Bib, a novel, pixel-precise, non-overlapping and noiseless document layout analysis dataset developed in close collaboration between specialists in the fields of computer vision and humanities. Furthermore, we propose a novel, computer-aided, segmentation pipeline in order to alleviate the burden represented by the time-consuming process of manual annotation, necessary for the generation of the ground truth segmentation maps. Finally, we present a standardized few-shot version of the dataset (U-DIADS-BibFS), with the aim of encouraging the development of models and solutions able to address this task with as few samples as possible, which would allow for more effective use in a real-world scenario, where collecting a large number of segmentations is not always feasible.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly depends on high-quality supervised data, yet existing instruction-tuning and RL datasets remain costly to curate and often rely on synthetic samples that introduce hallucination and limited diversity. At the same time, textbooks and exercise materials contain abundant, high-quality human-authored Question-Answer(QA) content that remains underexploited due to the difficulty of transforming raw PDFs into AI-ready supervision. Although modern OCR and vision-language models can accurately parse document structure, their outputs lack the semantic alignment required for training. We propose an automated pipeline that extracts well-formed QA and visual-QA (VQA) pairs from educational documents by combining layout-aware OCR with LLM-based semantic parsing. Experiments across diverse document types show that the method produces accurate, aligned, and low-noise QA/VQA pairs. This approach enables scalable use of real-world educational content and provides a practical alternative to synthetic data generation for improving reasoning-oriented LLM training. All code and data-processing pipelines are open-sourced at https://github.com/OpenDCAI/DataFlow.

Regesta are catalogs of summaries of other documents and, in some cases, are the only source of information about the content of such full-length documents. For this reason, they are of great interest to scholars in many social and humanities fields. In this work, we focus on Regesta Pontificum Romanum, a large collection of papal registers. Regesta are visually rich documents, where the layout is as important as the text content to convey the contained information through the structure, and are inherently multi-page documents. Among Digital Humanities techniques that can help scholars efficiently exploit regesta and other documental sources in the form of scanned documents, Document Parsing has emerged as a task to process document images and convert them into machine-readable structured representations, usually markup language. However, current models focus on scientific and business documents, and most of them consider only single-paged documents. To overcome this limitation, in this work, we propose {\mu}gat, an extension of the recently proposed Document parsing Nougat architecture, which can handle elements spanning over the single page limits. Specifically, we adapt Nougat to process a larger, multi-page context, consisting of the previous and the following page, while parsing the current page. Experimental results, both qualitative and quantitative, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach also in the case of the challenging Regesta Pontificum Romanorum.

Optical Music Recognition is a field that has progressed significantly, bringing accurate systems that transcribe effectively music scores into digital formats. Despite this, there are still several limitations that hinder OMR from achieving its full potential. Specifically, state of the art OMR still depends on multi-stage pipelines for performing full-page transcription, as well as it has only been demonstrated in monophonic cases, leaving behind very relevant engravings. In this work, we present the Sheet Music Transformer++, an end-to-end model that is able to transcribe full-page polyphonic music scores without the need of a previous Layout Analysis step. This is done thanks to an extensive curriculum learning-based pretraining with synthetic data generation. We conduct several experiments on a full-page extension of a public polyphonic transcription dataset. The experimental outcomes confirm that the model is competent at transcribing full-page pianoform scores, marking a noteworthy milestone in end-to-end OMR transcription.

Robust Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is critical for the automated processing and understanding of historical documents with complex page organizations. This paper benchmarks five state-of-the-art object detection architectures on three annotated datasets representing a spectrum of codicological complexity: The e-NDP, a corpus of Parisian medieval registers (1326-1504); CATMuS, a diverse multiclass dataset derived from various medieval and modern sources (ca.12th-17th centuries) and HORAE, a corpus of decorated books of hours (ca.13th-16th centuries). We evaluate two Transformer-based models (Co-DETR, Grounding DINO) against three YOLO variants (AABB, OBB, and YOLO-World). Our findings reveal significant performance variations dependent on model architecture, data set characteristics, and bounding box representation. In the e-NDP dataset, Co-DETR achieves state-of-the-art results (0.752 mAP@.50:.95), closely followed by YOLOv11X-OBB (0.721). Conversely, on the more complex CATMuS and HORAE datasets, the CNN-based YOLOv11x-OBB significantly outperforms all other models (0.564 and 0.568, respectively). This study unequivocally demonstrates that using Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBB) is not a minor refinement but a fundamental requirement for accurately modeling the non-Cartesian nature of historical manuscripts. We conclude that a key trade-off exists between the global context awareness of Transformers, ideal for structured layouts, and the superior generalization of CNN-OBB models for visually diverse and complex documents.

We introduce a method to generate 3D scenes that are disentangled into their component objects. This disentanglement is unsupervised, relying only on the knowledge of a large pretrained text-to-image model. Our key insight is that objects can be discovered by finding parts of a 3D scene that, when rearranged spatially, still produce valid configurations of the same scene. Concretely, our method jointly optimizes multiple NeRFs from scratch - each representing its own object - along with a set of layouts that composite these objects into scenes. We then encourage these composited scenes to be in-distribution according to the image generator. We show that despite its simplicity, our approach successfully generates 3D scenes decomposed into individual objects, enabling new capabilities in text-to-3D content creation. For results and an interactive demo, see our project page at https://dave.ml/layoutlearning/

Diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable progress in generating realistic images. However, challenges remain in accurately understanding and synthesizing the layout requirements in the textual prompts. To align the generated image with layout instructions, we present a training-free layout calibration system SimM that intervenes in the generative process on the fly during inference time. Specifically, following a "check-locate-rectify" pipeline, the system first analyses the prompt to generate the target layout and compares it with the intermediate outputs to automatically detect errors. Then, by moving the located activations and making intra- and inter-map adjustments, the rectification process can be performed with negligible computational overhead. To evaluate SimM over a range of layout requirements, we present a benchmark SimMBench that compensates for the lack of superlative spatial relations in existing datasets. And both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SimM in calibrating the layout inconsistencies. Our project page is at https://simm-t2i.github.io/SimM.

We present a Neural Network based Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model architecture that can be trained to recognize full pages of handwritten or printed text without image segmentation. Being based on Image to Sequence architecture, it can extract text present in an image and then sequence it correctly without imposing any constraints regarding orientation, layout and size of text and non-text. Further, it can also be trained to generate auxiliary markup related to formatting, layout and content. We use character level vocabulary, thereby enabling language and terminology of any subject. The model achieves a new state-of-art in paragraph level recognition on the IAM dataset. When evaluated on scans of real world handwritten free form test answers - beset with curved and slanted lines, drawings, tables, math, chemistry and other symbols - it performs better than all commercially available HTR cloud APIs. It is deployed in production as part of a commercial web application.

The Character Error Rate (CER) is a key metric for evaluating the quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, this metric assumes that text has been perfectly parsed, which is often not the case. Under page-parsing errors, CER becomes undefined, limiting its use as a metric and making evaluating page-level OCR challenging, particularly when using data that do not share a labelling schema. We introduce the Character Error Vector (CEV), a bag-of-characters evaluator for OCR. The CEV can be decomposed into parsing and OCR, and interaction error components. This decomposability allows practitioners to focus on the part of the Document Understanding pipeline that will have the greatest impact on overall text extraction quality. The CEV can be implemented using a variety of methods, of which we demonstrate SpACER (Spatially Aware Character Error Rate) and a Character distribution method using the Jensen-Shannon Distance. We validate the CEV's performance against other metrics: first, the relationship with CER; then, parse quality; and finally, as a direct measure of page-level OCR quality. The validation process shows that the CEV is a valuable bridge between parsing metrics and local metrics like CER. We analyse a dataset of archival newspapers made of degraded images with complex layouts and find that state-of-the-art end-to-end models are outperformed by more traditional pipeline approaches. Whilst the CEV requires character-level positioning for optimal triage, thresholding on easily available values can predict the main error source with an F1 of 0.91. We provide the CEV as part of a Python library to support Document understanding research.

Digitization projects in humanities often generate vast quantities of page images from historical documents, presenting significant challenges for manual sorting and analysis. These archives contain diverse content, including various text types (handwritten, typed, printed), graphical elements (drawings, maps, photos), and layouts (plain text, tables, forms). Efficiently processing this heterogeneous data requires automated methods to categorize pages based on their content, enabling tailored downstream analysis pipelines. This project addresses this need by developing and evaluating an image classification system specifically designed for historical document pages, leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The set of categories was chosen to facilitate content-specific processing workflows, separating pages requiring different analysis techniques (e.g., OCR for text, image analysis for graphics)

With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), rich document analysis technologies for applications like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and visual RAG are gaining significant attention. Recent research indicates that using VLMs can achieve better RAG performance, but processing rich documents still remains a challenge since a single page contains large amounts of information. In this paper, we present SCAN (SemantiC Document Layout ANalysis), a novel approach enhancing both textual and visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems working with visually rich documents. It is a VLM-friendly approach that identifies document components with appropriate semantic granularity, balancing context preservation with processing efficiency. SCAN uses a coarse-grained semantic approach that divides documents into coherent regions covering continuous components. We trained the SCAN model by fine-tuning object detection models with sophisticated annotation datasets. Our experimental results across English and Japanese datasets demonstrate that applying SCAN improves end-to-end textual RAG performance by up to 9.0\% and visual RAG performance by up to 6.4\%, outperforming conventional approaches and even commercial document processing solutions.

Harnessing the full potential of visually-rich documents requires retrieval systems that understand not just text, but intricate layouts, a core challenge in Visual Document Retrieval (VDR). The prevailing multi-vector architectures, while powerful, face a crucial storage bottleneck that current optimization strategies, such as embedding merging, pruning, or using abstract tokens, fail to resolve without compromising performance or ignoring vital layout cues. To address this, we introduce ColParse, a novel paradigm that leverages a document parsing model to generate a small set of layout-informed sub-image embeddings, which are then fused with a global page-level vector to create a compact and structurally-aware multi-vector representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces storage requirements by over 95% while simultaneously yielding significant performance gains across numerous benchmarks and base models. ColParse thus bridges the critical gap between the fine-grained accuracy of multi-vector retrieval and the practical demands of large-scale deployment, offering a new path towards efficient and interpretable multimodal information systems.

Document layout analysis is a critical preprocessing step in document intelligence, enabling the detection and localization of structural elements such as titles, text blocks, tables, and formulas. Despite its importance, existing layout detection models face significant challenges in generalizing across diverse document types, handling complex layouts, and achieving real-time performance for large-scale data processing. To address these limitations, we present PP-DocLayout, which achieves high precision and efficiency in recognizing 23 types of layout regions across diverse document formats. To meet different needs, we offer three models of varying scales. PP-DocLayout-L is a high-precision model based on the RT-DETR-L detector, achieving 90.4% mAP@0.5 and an end-to-end inference time of 13.4 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-M is a balanced model, offering 75.2% mAP@0.5 with an inference time of 12.7 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-S is a high-efficiency model designed for resource-constrained environments and real-time applications, with an inference time of 8.1 ms per page on a T4 GPU and 14.5 ms on a CPU. This work not only advances the state of the art in document layout analysis but also provides a robust solution for constructing high-quality training data, enabling advancements in document intelligence and multimodal AI systems. Code and models are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleX .

One important and particularly challenging step in the optical character recognition (OCR) of historical documents with complex layouts, such as newspapers, is the separation of text from non-text content (e.g. page borders or illustrations). This step is commonly referred to as page segmentation. While various rule-based algorithms have been proposed, the applicability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for this task recently has gained a lot of attention. In this paper, we perform a systematic evaluation of 11 different published DNN backbone architectures and 9 different tiling and scaling configurations for separating text, tables or table column lines. We also show the influence of the number of labels and the number of training pages on the segmentation quality, which we measure using the Matthews Correlation Coefficient. Our results show that (depending on the task) Inception-ResNet-v2 and EfficientNet backbones work best, vertical tiling is generally preferable to other tiling approaches, and training data that comprises 30 to 40 pages will be sufficient most of the time.

Converting user interfaces into code (UI2Code) is a crucial step in website development, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The automation of UI2Code is essential to streamline this task, beneficial for improving the development efficiency. There exist deep learning-based methods for the task; however, they heavily rely on a large amount of labeled training data and struggle with generalizing to real-world, unseen web page designs. The advent of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) presents potential for alleviating the issue, but they are difficult to comprehend the complex layouts in UIs and generate the accurate code with layout preserved. To address these issues, we propose LayoutCoder, a novel MLLM-based framework generating UI code from real-world webpage images, which includes three key modules: (1) Element Relation Construction, which aims at capturing UI layout by identifying and grouping components with similar structures; (2) UI Layout Parsing, which aims at generating UI layout trees for guiding the subsequent code generation process; and (3) Layout-Guided Code Fusion, which aims at producing the accurate code with layout preserved. For evaluation, we build a new benchmark dataset which involves 350 real-world websites named Snap2Code, divided into seen and unseen parts for mitigating the data leakage issue, besides the popular dataset Design2Code. Extensive evaluation shows the superior performance of LayoutCoder over the state-of-the-art approaches. Compared with the best-performing baseline, LayoutCoder improves 10.14% in the BLEU score and 3.95% in the CLIP score on average across all datasets.

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS), as the core of vector databases (VectorDBs), has become widely used in modern AI and ML systems, powering applications from information retrieval to bio-informatics. While graph-based ANNS methods achieve high query efficiency, their scalability is constrained by the available host memory. Recent disk-based ANNS approaches mitigate memory usage by offloading data to Solid-State Drives (SSDs). However, they still suffer from issues such as long I/O traversal path, misalignment with storage I/O granularity, and high in-memory indexing overhead, leading to significant I/O latency and ultimately limiting scalability for large-scale vector search. In this paper, we propose PageANN, a disk-based approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) framework designed for high performance and scalability. PageANN introduces a page-node graph structure that aligns logical graph nodes with physical SSD pages, thereby shortening I/O traversal paths and reducing I/O operations. Specifically, similar vectors are clustered into page nodes, and a co-designed disk data layout leverages this structure with a merging technique to store only representative vectors and topology information, avoiding unnecessary reads. To further improve efficiency, we design a memory management strategy that combines lightweight indexing with coordinated memory-disk data allocation, maximizing host memory utilization while minimizing query latency and storage overhead. Experimental results show that PageANN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) disk-based ANNS methods, achieving 1.85x-10.83x higher throughput and 51.7%-91.9% lower latency across different datasets and memory budgets, while maintaining comparable high recall accuracy.

Logical page segmentation is an important step in document analysis, enabling better semantic representations, information retrieval, and text understanding. Previous approaches define logical segmentation either through text or geometric objects, relying on OCR or precise geometry. To avoid the need for OCR, we define the task purely as segmentation in the image domain. Furthermore, to ensure the evaluation remains unaffected by geometrical variations that do not impact text segmentation, we propose to use only foreground text pixels in the evaluation metric and disregard all background pixels. To support research in logical document segmentation, we introduce TextBite, a dataset of historical Czech documents spanning the 18th to 20th centuries, featuring diverse layouts from newspapers, dictionaries, and handwritten records. The dataset comprises 8,449 page images with 78,863 annotated segments of logically and thematically coherent text. We propose a set of baseline methods combining text region detection and relation prediction. The dataset, baselines and evaluation framework can be accessed at https://github.com/DCGM/textbite-dataset.

Digitization of scanned receipts aims to extract text from receipt images and save it into structured documents. This is usually split into two sub-tasks: text localization and optical character recognition (OCR). Most existing OCR models only focus on the cropped text instance images, which require the bounding box information provided by a text region detection model. Introducing an additional detector to identify the text instance images in advance adds complexity, however instance-level OCR models have very low accuracy when processing the whole image for the document-level OCR, such as receipt images containing multiple text lines arranged in various layouts. To this end, we propose a localization-free document-level OCR model for transcribing all the characters in a receipt image into an ordered sequence end-to-end. Specifically, we finetune the pretrained instance-level model TrOCR with randomly cropped image chunks, and gradually increase the image chunk size to generalize the recognition ability from instance images to full-page images. In our experiments on the SROIE receipt OCR dataset, the model finetuned with our strategy achieved 64.4 F1-score and a 22.8% character error rate (CER), respectively, which outperforms the baseline results with 48.5 F1-score and 50.6% CER. The best model, which splits the full image into 15 equally sized chunks, gives 87.8 F1-score and 4.98% CER with minimal additional pre or post-processing of the output. Moreover, the characters in the generated document-level sequences are arranged in the reading order, which is practical for real-world applications.

Information extraction from handwritten documents involves traditionally three distinct steps: Document Layout Analysis, Handwritten Text Recognition, and Named Entity Recognition. Recent approaches have attempted to integrate these steps into a single process using fully end-to-end architectures. Despite this, these integrated approaches have not yet matched the performance of language models, when applied to information extraction in plain text. In this paper, we introduce DANIEL (Document Attention Network for Information Extraction and Labelling), a fully end-to-end architecture integrating a language model and designed for comprehensive handwritten document understanding. DANIEL performs layout recognition, handwriting recognition, and named entity recognition on full-page documents. Moreover, it can simultaneously learn across multiple languages, layouts, and tasks. For named entity recognition, the ontology to be applied can be specified via the input prompt. The architecture employs a convolutional encoder capable of processing images of any size without resizing, paired with an autoregressive decoder based on a transformer-based language model. DANIEL achieves competitive results on four datasets, including a new state-of-the-art performance on RIMES 2009 and M-POPP for Handwriting Text Recognition, and IAM NER for Named Entity Recognition. Furthermore, DANIEL is much faster than existing approaches. We provide the source code and the weights of the trained models at https://github.com/Shulk97/daniel.

The recent advancement of autonomous agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant potential for automating tasks on mobile devices through graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Despite initial progress, these agents still face challenges when handling complex real-world tasks. These challenges arise from a lack of knowledge about real-life mobile applications in LLM-based agents, which may lead to ineffective task planning and even cause hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel LLM-based agent framework called MapAgent that leverages memory constructed from historical trajectories to augment current task planning. Specifically, we first propose a trajectory-based memory mechanism that transforms task execution trajectories into a reusable and structured page-memory database. Each page within a trajectory is extracted as a compact yet comprehensive snapshot, capturing both its UI layout and functional context. Secondly, we introduce a coarse-to-fine task planning approach that retrieves relevant pages from the memory database based on similarity and injects them into the LLM planner to compensate for potential deficiencies in understanding real-world app scenarios, thereby achieving more informed and context-aware task planning. Finally, planned tasks are transformed into executable actions through a task executor supported by a dual-LLM architecture, ensuring effective tracking of task progress. Experimental results in real-world scenarios demonstrate that MapAgent achieves superior performance to existing methods. The code will be open-sourced to support further research.

Computer use agents create new privacy risks: training data collected from real websites inevitably contains sensitive information, and cloud-hosted inference exposes user screenshots. Detecting personally identifiable information in web screenshots is critical for privacy-preserving deployment, but no public benchmark exists for this task. We introduce WebPII, a fine-grained synthetic benchmark of 44,865 annotated e-commerce UI images designed with three key properties: extended PII taxonomy including transaction-level identifiers that enable reidentification, anticipatory detection for partially-filled forms where users are actively entering data, and scalable generation through VLM-based UI reproduction. Experiments validate that these design choices improve layout-invariant detection across diverse interfaces and generalization to held-out page types. We train WebRedact to demonstrate practical utility, more than doubling text-extraction baseline accuracy (0.753 vs 0.357 mAP@50) at real-time CPU latency (20ms). We release the dataset and model to support privacy-preserving computer use research.

Long-document multimodal question answering requires a system to locate sparse evidence in long PDFs and integrate clues from text, tables, images, charts, and complex layouts. Existing RAG methods mostly rely on fixed Top-k retrieval over text chunks or pages. Text retrieval can compress the context but often loses visual and layout information; page-level visual retrieval preserves the original page, yet it also sends large irrelevant regions to the reader, leading to a static trade-off among evidence coverage, noise, and inference cost. This paper proposes MAGE-RAG, a multigranular adaptive graph evidence framework for long-document multimodal QA. MAGE-RAG uses page retrieval as the entry point for query-time evidence construction. Offline, it builds an evidence graph with page nodes and element nodes, encoding containment, reading order, layout adjacency, section hierarchy, and semantic-neighbor relations. At query time, an online evidence controller iteratively activates, opens, searches, and prunes evidence under explicit budgets. The resulting evidence subgraph is then rendered into structured multimodal reader input, allowing the LVLM to consume compact and relevant evidence within a limited context. On LongDocURL and MMLongBench-Doc, we establish a unified comparison and analysis protocol covering Direct MLLM, Text RAG, Page-level Visual RAG, and Graph/Agentic RAG. Experiments show that MAGE-RAG achieves 52.75 overall accuracy on LongDocURL, and 53.26 accuracy with 51.19 F1 on MMLongBench-Doc. Fine-grained breakdowns, budget-performance curves, ablations, and trace-based analysis further show that query-time evidence subgraph construction can balance dispersed evidence coverage with context-noise control. Our code is available at https://github.com/laonuo2004/MAGE-RAG.git.

Document parsing is a fundamental task in multimodal understanding, supporting a wide range of downstream applications such as information extraction and intelligent document analysis. Benefiting from strong semantic modeling and robust generalization, VLM-based end-to-end approaches have emerged as the mainstream paradigm in recent years. However, these models often suffer from substantial inference latency, as they must auto-regressively generate long token sequences when processing long-form documents. In this work, motivated by the extremely long outputs and complex layout structures commonly found in document parsing, we propose a training-free and highly efficient acceleration method. Inspired by speculative decoding, we employ a lightweight document parsing pipeline as a draft model to predict batches of future tokens, while the more accurate VLM verifies these draft predictions in parallel. Moreover, we further exploit the layout-structured nature of documents by partitioning each page into independent regions, enabling parallel decoding of each region using the same draft-verify strategy. The final predictions are then assembled according to the natural reading order. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: on the general-purpose OmniDocBench, our method provides a 2.42x lossless acceleration for the dots.ocr model, and achieves up to 4.89x acceleration on long-document parsing tasks. We will release our code to facilitate reproducibility and future research.

Several recent deep learning (DL) based techniques perform considerably well on image-based multilingual text detection. However, their performance relies heavily on the availability and quality of training data. There are numerous types of page-level document images consisting of information in several modalities, languages, fonts, and layouts. This makes text detection a challenging problem in the field of computer vision (CV), especially for low-resource or handwritten languages. Furthermore, there is a scarcity of word-level labeled data for text detection, especially for multilingual settings and Indian scripts that incorporate both printed and handwritten text. Conventionally, Indian script text detection requires training a DL model on plenty of labeled data, but to the best of our knowledge, no relevant datasets are available. Manual annotation of such data requires a lot of time, effort, and expertise. In order to solve this problem, we propose TEXTRON, a Data Programming-based approach, where users can plug various text detection methods into a weak supervision-based learning framework. One can view this approach to multilingual text detection as an ensemble of different CV-based techniques and DL approaches. TEXTRON can leverage the predictions of DL models pre-trained on a significant amount of language data in conjunction with CV-based methods to improve text detection in other languages. We demonstrate that TEXTRON can improve the detection performance for documents written in Indian languages, despite the absence of corresponding labeled data. Further, through extensive experimentation, we show improvement brought about by our approach over the current State-of-the-art (SOTA) models, especially for handwritten Devanagari text. Code and dataset has been made available at https://github.com/IITB-LEAP-OCR/TEXTRON

Document image parsing is challenging due to its complexly intertwined elements such as text paragraphs, figures, formulas, and tables. Current approaches either assemble specialized expert models or directly generate page-level content autoregressively, facing integration overhead, efficiency bottlenecks, and layout structure degradation despite their decent performance. To address these limitations, we present Dolphin (\textbf{Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting}), a novel multimodal document image parsing model following an analyze-then-parse paradigm. In the first stage, Dolphin generates a sequence of layout elements in reading order. These heterogeneous elements, serving as anchors and coupled with task-specific prompts, are fed back to Dolphin for parallel content parsing in the second stage. To train Dolphin, we construct a large-scale dataset of over 30 million samples, covering multi-granularity parsing tasks. Through comprehensive evaluations on both prevalent benchmarks and self-constructed ones, Dolphin achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse page-level and element-level settings, while ensuring superior efficiency through its lightweight architecture and parallel parsing mechanism. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/ByteDance/Dolphin

Front-end engineering involves a complex workflow where engineers conceptualize designs, translate them into code, and iteratively refine the implementation. While recent benchmarks primarily focus on converting visual designs to code, we present FullFront, a benchmark designed to evaluate Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across the full front-end development pipeline. FullFront assesses three fundamental tasks that map directly to the front-end engineering pipeline: Webpage Design (conceptualization phase), Webpage Perception QA (comprehension of visual organization and elements), and Webpage Code Generation (implementation phase). Unlike existing benchmarks that use either scraped websites with bloated code or oversimplified LLM-generated HTML, FullFront employs a novel, two-stage process to transform real-world webpages into clean, standardized HTML while maintaining diverse visual designs and avoiding copyright issues. Extensive testing of state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals significant limitations in page perception, code generation (particularly for image handling and layout), and interaction implementation. Our results quantitatively demonstrate performance disparities across models and tasks, and highlight a substantial gap between current MLLM capabilities and human expert performance in front-end engineering. The FullFront benchmark and code are available in https://github.com/Mikivishy/FullFront.

Document intelligence requires accurate text extraction and reliable reasoning over document content. We introduce DISCO, a Document Intelligence Suite for COmparative Evaluation, that evaluates optical character recognition (OCR) pipelines and vision-language models (VLMs) separately on parsing and question answering across diverse document types, including handwritten text, multilingual scripts, medical forms, infographics, and multi-page documents. Our evaluation shows that performance varies substantially across tasks and document characteristics, underscoring the need for complexity-aware approach selection. OCR pipelines are generally more reliable for handwriting and for long or multi-page documents, where explicit text grounding supports text-heavy reasoning, while VLMs perform better on multilingual text and visually rich layouts. Task-aware prompting yields mixed effects, improving performance on some document types while degrading it on others. These findings provide empirical guidance for selecting document processing strategies based on document structure and reasoning demands.

Document parsing is a core task in document intelligence, supporting applications such as information extraction, retrieval-augmented generation, and automated document analysis. However, real-world documents often feature complex layouts with multi-level tables, embedded images or formulas, and cross-page structures, which remain challenging for existing OCR systems. We introduce MonkeyOCR v1.5, a unified vision-language framework that enhances both layout understanding and content recognition through a two-stage parsing pipeline. The first stage employs a large multimodal model to jointly predict document layout and reading order, leveraging visual information to ensure structural and sequential consistency. The second stage performs localized recognition of text, formulas, and tables within detected regions, maintaining high visual fidelity while reducing error propagation. To address complex table structures, we propose a visual consistency-based reinforcement learning scheme that evaluates recognition quality via render-and-compare alignment, improving structural accuracy without manual annotations. Additionally, two specialized modules, Image-Decoupled Table Parsing and Type-Guided Table Merging, are introduced to enable reliable parsing of tables containing embedded images and reconstruction of tables crossing pages or columns. Comprehensive experiments on OmniDocBench v1.5 demonstrate that MonkeyOCR v1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming PPOCR-VL and MinerU 2.5 while showing exceptional robustness in visually complex document scenarios.

Document parsing has recently advanced with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that directly map document images to structured outputs. Traditional cascaded pipelines depend on precise layout analysis and often fail under casually captured or non-standard conditions. Although end-to-end approaches mitigate this dependency, they still exhibit repetitive, hallucinated, and structurally inconsistent predictions - primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality full-page (document-level) end-to-end parsing data and the lack of structure-aware training strategies. To address these challenges, we propose a data-training co-design framework for robust end-to-end document parsing. A Realistic Scene Synthesis strategy constructs large-scale, structurally diverse full-page end-to-end supervision by composing layout templates with rich document elements, while a Document-Aware Training Recipe introduces progressive learning and structure-token optimization to enhance structural fidelity and decoding stability. We further build Wild-OmniDocBench, a benchmark derived from real-world captured documents for robustness evaluation. Integrated into a 1B-parameter MLLM, our method achieves superior accuracy and robustness across both scanned/digital and real-world captured scenarios. All models, data synthesis pipelines, and benchmarks will be publicly released to advance future research in document understanding.

Document Visual Question Answering (Document VQA) must cope with documents that span dozens of pages, yet leading systems still concatenate every page or rely on very large vision-language models, both of which are memory-hungry. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an attractive alternative, first retrieving a concise set of relevant segments before generating answers from this selected evidence. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the impact of incorporating RAG into Document VQA through different retrieval variants - text-based retrieval using OCR tokens and purely visual retrieval without OCR - across multiple models and benchmarks. Evaluated on the multi-page datasets MP-DocVQA, DUDE, and InfographicVQA, the text-centric variant improves the "concatenate-all-pages" baseline by up to +22.5 ANLS, while the visual variant achieves +5.0 ANLS improvement without requiring any text extraction. An ablation confirms that retrieval and reranking components drive most of the gain, whereas the layout-guided chunking strategy - proposed in several recent works to leverage page structure - fails to help on these datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that careful evidence selection consistently boosts accuracy across multiple model sizes and multi-page benchmarks, underscoring its practical value for real-world Document VQA.

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.

Document Question Answering (QA) presents a challenge in understanding visually-rich documents (VRD), particularly those dominated by lengthy textual content like research journal articles. Existing studies primarily focus on real-world documents with sparse text, while challenges persist in comprehending the hierarchical semantic relations among multiple pages to locate multimodal components. To address this gap, we propose PDF-MVQA, which is tailored for research journal articles, encompassing multiple pages and multimodal information retrieval. Unlike traditional machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks, our approach aims to retrieve entire paragraphs containing answers or visually rich document entities like tables and figures. Our contributions include the introduction of a comprehensive PDF Document VQA dataset, allowing the examination of semantically hierarchical layout structures in text-dominant documents. We also present new VRD-QA frameworks designed to grasp textual contents and relations among document layouts simultaneously, extending page-level understanding to the entire multi-page document. Through this work, we aim to enhance the capabilities of existing vision-and-language models in handling challenges posed by text-dominant documents in VRD-QA.

Recent advancements in Large Generative Models (LGMs) have revolutionized multi-modal generation. However, generating illustrated storybooks remains an open challenge, where prior works mainly decompose this task into separate stages, and thus, holistic multi-modal grounding remains limited. Besides, while safety alignment is studied for text- or image-only generation, existing works rarely integrate child-specific safety constraints into narrative planning and sequence-level multi-modal verification. To address these limitations, we propose BookAgent, a safety-aware multi-agent collaboration framework designed for high-quality, safety-aware visual narratives. Different from prior story visualization models that assume a fixed storyline sequence, BookAgent targets end-to-end storybook synthesis from a user draft by jointly planning, scripting, illustrating, and globally repairing inconsistencies. To ensure precise multi-modal grounding, BookAgent dynamically calibrates page-level alignment between textual scripts and visual layouts. Furthermore, BookAgent calibrates holistic consistency from the temporal dimension, by verifying-then-rectifying global inconsistencies in character identity and storytelling logic. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BookAgent significantly outperforms current methods in narrative coherence, visual consistency, and safety compliance, offering a robust paradigm for reliable agents in complex multi-modal creation. The implementation will be publicly released at https://github.com/bogao-code/BookAgent/tree/main.

Scientific documents record research findings and valuable human knowledge, comprising a vast corpus of high-quality data. Leveraging multi-modality data extracted from these documents and assessing large models' abilities to handle scientific document-oriented tasks is therefore meaningful. Despite promising advancements, large models still perform poorly on multi-page scientific document extraction and understanding tasks, and their capacity to process within-document data formats such as charts and equations remains under-explored. To address these issues, we present DocGenome, a structured document benchmark constructed by annotating 500K scientific documents from 153 disciplines in the arXiv open-access community, using our custom auto-labeling pipeline. DocGenome features four key characteristics: 1) Completeness: It is the first dataset to structure data from all modalities including 13 layout attributes along with their LaTeX source codes. 2) Logicality: It provides 6 logical relationships between different entities within each scientific document. 3) Diversity: It covers various document-oriented tasks, including document classification, visual grounding, document layout detection, document transformation, open-ended single-page QA and multi-page QA. 4) Correctness: It undergoes rigorous quality control checks conducted by a specialized team. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages of DocGenome and objectively evaluate the performance of large models on our benchmark.

Large vision-language models increasingly rely on long-context modeling to reason over documents, hour-level videos, and long-horizon agent trajectories, requiring them to locate relevant evidence across interleaved text and images. Prior work has studied this behavior using retrieval heads in large language models, but its copy-based criterion does not directly apply when evidence appears in images. We introduce a multimodal retrieval head detection method that scores attention from question tokens to textual or visual evidence. With this method, we show that multimodal retrieval heads are sparse, intrinsic, and causally important: only 4.4-10.2% of attention heads account for 50% of the positive retrieval-score mass, and masking the top-5% selected heads drops MMLongBench-Doc from 48.2% to 5.7% and SlideVQA from 71.2% to 8.9%, while random-head masking is far less damaging. Further analysis shows that these heads are partly shared across modalities yet remain dynamic within each modality, with image retrieval heads changing more than text retrieval heads as context length and haystack modality change. Without further training, we find that these heads can also be used directly to rank visually rich documents: on MMDocIR, Qwen3-VL-8B selected-head scoring improves Recall@1 by 7.7/7.4 macro/micro points for page retrieval and 6.3/6.8 points for layout retrieval over the strongest reported baseline.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated strong multimodal reasoning capabilities on long and complex documents. However, their high memory footprint makes them impractical for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. We present DocSLM, an efficient Small Vision-Language Model designed for long-document understanding under constrained memory resources. DocSLM incorporates a Hierarchical Multimodal Compressor that jointly encodes visual, textual, and layout information from each page into a fixed-length sequence, greatly reducing memory consumption while preserving both local and global semantics. To enable scalable processing over arbitrarily long inputs, we introduce a Streaming Abstention mechanism that operates on document segments sequentially and filters low-confidence responses using an entropy-based uncertainty calibrator. Across multiple long multimodal document benchmarks, DocSLM matches or surpasses state-of-the-art methods while using 82\% fewer visual tokens, 75\% fewer parameters, and 71\% lower latency, delivering reliable multimodal document understanding on lightweight edge devices. Code and Model are available in https://github.com/Tanveer81/DocSLM.git.

Automatic table detection in PDF documents has achieved a great success but tabular data extraction are still challenging due to the integrity and noise issues in detected table areas. The accurate data extraction is extremely crucial in finance area. Inspired by this, the aim of this research is proposing an automated table detection and tabular data extraction from financial PDF documents. We proposed a method that consists of three main processes, which are detecting table areas with a Faster R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Network) model with Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) on each page image, extracting contents and structures by a compounded layout segmentation technique based on optical character recognition (OCR) and formulating regular expression rules for table header separation. The tabular data extraction feature is embedded with rule-based filtering and restructuring functions that are highly scalable. We annotate a new Financial Documents dataset with table regions for the experiment. The excellent table detection performance of the detection model is obtained from our customized dataset. The main contributions of this paper are proposing the Financial Documents dataset with table-area annotations, the superior detection model and the rule-based layout segmentation technique for the tabular data extraction from PDF files.

GutenOCR is a family of grounded OCR front-ends obtained by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B. The resulting single-checkpoint vision-language models expose reading, detection, and grounding through a unified, prompt-based interface. Trained on business documents, scientific articles, and synthetic grounding data, the models support full-page and localized reading with line- and paragraph-level bounding boxes and conditional ``where is x?'' queries. We introduce a grounded OCR evaluation protocol and show that GutenOCR-7B more than doubles the composite grounded OCR score of its Qwen2.5-VL-7B backbone on 10.5K held-out business and scientific pages (0.40 to 0.82). On Fox and OmniDocBench v1.5, our approach substantially improves region- and line-level OCR as well as text-detection recall, but reveals trade-offs in page-level linearization, color-guided OCR, and formula-heavy layouts.

Japanese scene text poses challenges that multilingual benchmarks often fail to capture, including mixed scripts, frequent vertical writing, and a character inventory far larger than the Latin alphabet. Although Japanese is included in several multilingual benchmarks, these resources do not adequately capture the language-specific complexities. Meanwhile, existing Japanese visual text datasets have primarily focused on scanned documents, leaving in-the-wild scene text underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce JaWildText, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Japanese scene text understanding. JaWildText contains 3,241 instances from 2,961 images newly captured in Japan, with 1.12 million annotated characters spanning 3,643 unique character types. It comprises three complementary tasks that vary in visual organization, output format, and writing style: (i) Dense Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA), which requires reasoning over multiple pieces of visual text evidence; (ii) Receipt Key Information Extraction (KIE), which tests layout-aware structured extraction from mobile-captured receipts; and (iii) Handwriting OCR, which evaluates page-level transcription across various media and writing directions. We evaluate 14 open-weight VLMs and find that the best model achieves an average score of 0.64 across the three tasks. Error analyses show recognition remains the dominant bottleneck, especially for kanji. JaWildText enables fine-grained, script-aware diagnosis of Japanese scene text capabilities, and will be released with evaluation code.

It is common in graphic design humans visually arrange various elements according to their design intent and semantics. For example, a title text almost always appears on top of other elements in a document. In this work, we generate graphic layouts that can flexibly incorporate such design semantics, either specified implicitly or explicitly by a user. We optimize using the latent space of an off-the-shelf layout generation model, allowing our approach to be complementary to and used with existing layout generation models. Our approach builds on a generative layout model based on a Transformer architecture, and formulates the layout generation as a constrained optimization problem where design constraints are used for element alignment, overlap avoidance, or any other user-specified relationship. We show in the experiments that our approach is capable of generating realistic layouts in both constrained and unconstrained generation tasks with a single model. The code is available at https://github.com/ktrk115/const_layout .

Creating layouts is a fundamental step in graphic design. In this work, we propose to use text as the guidance to create graphic layouts, i.e., Text-to-Layout, aiming to lower the design barriers. Text-to-Layout is a challenging task, because it needs to consider the implicit, combined, and incomplete layout constraints from text, each of which has not been studied in previous work. To address this, we present a two-stage approach, named parse-then-place. The approach introduces an intermediate representation (IR) between text and layout to represent diverse layout constraints. With IR, Text-to-Layout is decomposed into a parse stage and a place stage. The parse stage takes a textual description as input and generates an IR, in which the implicit constraints from the text are transformed into explicit ones. The place stage generates layouts based on the IR. To model combined and incomplete constraints, we use a Transformer-based layout generation model and carefully design a way to represent constraints and layouts as sequences. Besides, we adopt the pretrain-then-finetune strategy to boost the performance of the layout generation model with large-scale unlabeled layouts. To evaluate our approach, we construct two Text-to-Layout datasets and conduct experiments on them. Quantitative results, qualitative analysis, and user studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Visual layout plays a critical role in graphic design fields such as advertising, posters, and web UI design. The recent trend towards content-aware layout generation through generative models has shown promise, yet it often overlooks the semantic intricacies of layout design by treating it as a simple numerical optimization. To bridge this gap, we introduce PosterLlama, a network designed for generating visually and textually coherent layouts by reformatting layout elements into HTML code and leveraging the rich design knowledge embedded within language models. Furthermore, we enhance the robustness of our model with a unique depth-based poster augmentation strategy. This ensures our generated layouts remain semantically rich but also visually appealing, even with limited data. Our extensive evaluations across several benchmarks demonstrate that PosterLlama outperforms existing methods in producing authentic and content-aware layouts. It supports an unparalleled range of conditions, including but not limited to unconditional layout generation, element conditional layout generation, layout completion, among others, serving as a highly versatile user manipulation tool.

In recent years, the use of multi-modal pre-trained Transformers has led to significant advancements in visually-rich document understanding. However, existing models have mainly focused on features such as text and vision while neglecting the importance of layout relationship between text nodes. In this paper, we propose GraphLayoutLM, a novel document understanding model that leverages the modeling of layout structure graph to inject document layout knowledge into the model. GraphLayoutLM utilizes a graph reordering algorithm to adjust the text sequence based on the graph structure. Additionally, our model uses a layout-aware multi-head self-attention layer to learn document layout knowledge. The proposed model enables the understanding of the spatial arrangement of text elements, improving document comprehension. We evaluate our model on various benchmarks, including FUNSD, XFUND and CORD, and achieve state-of-the-art results among these datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method provides a significant improvement over existing approaches and showcases the importance of incorporating layout information into document understanding models. We also conduct an ablation study to investigate the contribution of each component of our model. The results show that both the graph reordering algorithm and the layout-aware multi-head self-attention layer play a crucial role in achieving the best performance.

Document AI has advanced rapidly and is attracting increasing attention. Yet, while most efforts have focused on document layout analysis (DLA), its generative counterpart, document layout generation, remains underexplored. A major obstacle lies in the scarcity of diverse layouts: academic papers with Manhattan-style structures dominate existing studies, while open-world genres such as newspapers and magazines remain severely underrepresented. To address this gap, we curate OmniLayout-1M, the first million-scale dataset of diverse document layouts, covering six common document types and comprising contemporary layouts collected from multiple sources. Moreover, since existing methods struggle in complex domains and often fail to arrange long sequences coherently, we introduce OmniLayout-LLM, a 0.5B model with designed two-stage Coarse-to-Fine learning paradigm: 1) learning universal layout principles from OmniLayout-1M with coarse category definitions, and 2) transferring the knowledge to a specific domain with fine-grained annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves strong performance on multiple domains in M^{6}Doc dataset, substantially surpassing both existing layout generation experts and several latest general-purpose LLMs. Our code, models, and dataset will be publicly released.

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

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.

Graphic layout generation, a growing research field, plays a significant role in user engagement and information perception. Existing methods primarily treat layout generation as a numerical optimization task, focusing on quantitative aspects while overlooking the semantic information of layout, such as the relationship between each layout element. In this paper, we propose LayoutNUWA, the first model that treats layout generation as a code generation task to enhance semantic information and harness the hidden layout expertise of large language models~(LLMs). More concretely, we develop a Code Instruct Tuning (CIT) approach comprising three interconnected modules: 1) the Code Initialization (CI) module quantifies the numerical conditions and initializes them as HTML code with strategically placed masks; 2) the Code Completion (CC) module employs the formatting knowledge of LLMs to fill in the masked portions within the HTML code; 3) the Code Rendering (CR) module transforms the completed code into the final layout output, ensuring a highly interpretable and transparent layout generation procedure that directly maps code to a visualized layout. We attain significant state-of-the-art performance (even over 50\% improvements) on multiple datasets, showcasing the strong capabilities of LayoutNUWA. Our code is available at https://github.com/ProjectNUWA/LayoutNUWA.

Layout design is an important task in various design fields, including user interface, document, and graphic design. As this task requires tedious manual effort by designers, prior works have attempted to automate this process using generative models, but commonly fell short of providing intuitive user controls and achieving design objectives. In this paper, we build a conditional latent diffusion model, PLay, that generates parametrically conditioned layouts in vector graphic space from user-specified guidelines, which are commonly used by designers for representing their design intents in current practices. Our method outperforms prior works across three datasets on metrics including FID and FD-VG, and in user study. Moreover, it brings a novel and interactive experience to professional layout design processes.

Attaining a high degree of user controllability in visual generation often requires intricate, fine-grained inputs like layouts. However, such inputs impose a substantial burden on users when compared to simple text inputs. To address the issue, we study how Large Language Models (LLMs) can serve as visual planners by generating layouts from text conditions, and thus collaborate with visual generative models. We propose LayoutGPT, a method to compose in-context visual demonstrations in style sheet language to enhance the visual planning skills of LLMs. LayoutGPT can generate plausible layouts in multiple domains, ranging from 2D images to 3D indoor scenes. LayoutGPT also shows superior performance in converting challenging language concepts like numerical and spatial relations to layout arrangements for faithful text-to-image generation. When combined with a downstream image generation model, LayoutGPT outperforms text-to-image models/systems by 20-40% and achieves comparable performance as human users in designing visual layouts for numerical and spatial correctness. Lastly, LayoutGPT achieves comparable performance to supervised methods in 3D indoor scene synthesis, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential in multiple visual domains.

Text Summarization is a popular task and an active area of research for the Natural Language Processing community. By definition, it requires to account for long input texts, a characteristic which poses computational challenges for neural models. Moreover, real-world documents come in a variety of complex, visually-rich, layouts. This information is of great relevance, whether to highlight salient content or to encode long-range interactions between textual passages. Yet, all publicly available summarization datasets only provide plain text content. To facilitate research on how to exploit visual/layout information to better capture long-range dependencies in summarization models, we present LoRaLay, a collection of datasets for long-range summarization with accompanying visual/layout information. We extend existing and popular English datasets (arXiv and PubMed) with layout information and propose four novel datasets -- consistently built from scholar resources -- covering French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean languages. Further, we propose new baselines merging layout-aware and long-range models -- two orthogonal approaches -- and obtain state-of-the-art results, showing the importance of combining both lines of research.

In this paper, we propose a method for generating layouts for image-based advertisements by leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM). Conventional advertisement layout techniques have predominantly relied on saliency mapping to detect salient regions within a background image, but such approaches often fail to fully account for the image's detailed composition and semantic content. To overcome this limitation, our method harnesses a VLM to recognize the products and other elements depicted in the background and to inform the placement of text and logos. The proposed layout-generation pipeline consists of two steps. In the first step, the VLM analyzes the image to identify object types and their spatial relationships, then produces a text-based "placement plan" based on this analysis. In the second step, that plan is rendered into the final layout by generating HTML-format code. We validated the effectiveness of our approach through evaluation experiments, conducting both quantitative and qualitative comparisons against existing methods. The results demonstrate that by explicitly considering the background image's content, our method produces noticeably higher-quality advertisement layouts.

Recognizing the layout of unstructured digital documents is an important step when parsing the documents into structured machine-readable format for downstream applications. Deep neural networks that are developed for computer vision have been proven to be an effective method to analyze layout of document images. However, document layout datasets that are currently publicly available are several magnitudes smaller than established computing vision datasets. Models have to be trained by transfer learning from a base model that is pre-trained on a traditional computer vision dataset. In this paper, we develop the PubLayNet dataset for document layout analysis by automatically matching the XML representations and the content of over 1 million PDF articles that are publicly available on PubMed Central. The size of the dataset is comparable to established computer vision datasets, containing over 360 thousand document images, where typical document layout elements are annotated. The experiments demonstrate that deep neural networks trained on PubLayNet accurately recognize the layout of scientific articles. The pre-trained models are also a more effective base mode for transfer learning on a different document domain. We release the dataset (https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/PubLayNet) to support development and evaluation of more advanced models for document layout analysis.

Document layout analysis is essential for downstream tasks such as information retrieval, extraction, OCR, and digitization. However, existing large-scale datasets like PubLayNet and DocBank lack fine-grained region labels and multilingual diversity, making them insufficient for representing complex document layouts. In contrast, human-annotated datasets such as M6Doc and D4LA offer richer labels and greater domain diversity, but are too small to train robust models and lack adequate multilingual coverage. This gap is especially pronounced for Indic documents, which encompass diverse scripts yet remain underrepresented in current datasets, further limiting progress in this space. To address these shortcomings, we introduce IndicDLP, a large-scale foundational document layout dataset spanning 11 representative Indic languages alongside English and 12 common document domains. Additionally, we curate UED-mini, a dataset derived from DocLayNet and M6Doc, to enhance pretraining and provide a solid foundation for Indic layout models. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning existing English models on IndicDLP significantly boosts performance, validating its effectiveness. Moreover, models trained on IndicDLP generalize well beyond Indic layouts, making it a valuable resource for document digitization. This work bridges gaps in scale, diversity, and annotation granularity, driving inclusive and efficient document understanding.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional text, and multi-step reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose supplementing the query sentence with a layout of its semantic structure. The semantic layout is used to break down the final reasoning decision into a series of lower-level decisions. We use a Neural Module Network architecture to implement this idea. We compare our model - NS3 (Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Search) - to a number of baselines, including state-of-the-art semantic code retrieval methods, and evaluate on two datasets - CodeSearchNet and Code Search and Question Answering. We demonstrate that our approach results in more precise code retrieval, and we study the effectiveness of our modular design when handling compositional queries.

Graphic layout designs play an essential role in visual communication. Yet handcrafting layout designs is skill-demanding, time-consuming, and non-scalable to batch production. Generative models emerge to make design automation scalable but it remains non-trivial to produce designs that comply with designers' multimodal desires, i.e., constrained by background images and driven by foreground content. We propose LayoutDETR that inherits the high quality and realism from generative modeling, while reformulating content-aware requirements as a detection problem: we learn to detect in a background image the reasonable locations, scales, and spatial relations for multimodal foreground elements in a layout. Our solution sets a new state-of-the-art performance for layout generation on public benchmarks and on our newly-curated ad banner dataset. We integrate our solution into a graphical system that facilitates user studies, and show that users prefer our designs over baselines by significant margins. Our code, models, dataset, graphical system, and demos are available at https://github.com/salesforce/LayoutDETR.

Content-aware graphic layout generation aims to automatically arrange visual elements along with a given content, such as an e-commerce product image. In this paper, we argue that the current layout generation approaches suffer from the limited training data for the high-dimensional layout structure. We show that a simple retrieval augmentation can significantly improve the generation quality. Our model, which is named Retrieval-Augmented Layout Transformer (RALF), retrieves nearest neighbor layout examples based on an input image and feeds these results into an autoregressive generator. Our model can apply retrieval augmentation to various controllable generation tasks and yield high-quality layouts within a unified architecture. Our extensive experiments show that RALF successfully generates content-aware layouts in both constrained and unconstrained settings and significantly outperforms the baselines.

Text logo design heavily relies on the creativity and expertise of professional designers, in which arranging element layouts is one of the most important procedures. However, few attention has been paid to this specific task which needs to take precise textural details and user constraints into consideration, but only on the broader tasks such as document/poster layout generation. In this paper, we propose a VLM-based framework that generates content-aware text logo layouts by integrating multi-modal inputs with user constraints, supporting a more flexible and stable layout design in real-world applications. We introduce two model techniques to reduce the computation for processing multiple glyph images simultaneously, while does not face performance degradation. To support instruction-tuning of out model, we construct two extensive text logo datasets, which are 5x more larger than the existing public dataset. Except for the geometric annotations (e.g. text masks and character recognition), we also compliment with comprehensive layout descriptions in natural language format, for more effective training to have reasoning ability when dealing with complex layouts and custom user constraints. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and datasets, when comparing with previous methods in various benchmarks to evaluate geometric aesthetics and human preferences. The code and datasets will be publicly available.

This paper introduces layout-aware graph modeling for multimodal RAG. Different from traditional RAG methods that mostly deal with flat text chunks, the proposed method takes into account the relationship of multimodalities by using a graph structure. To do that, a graph modeling structure is defined based on document layout parsing. The structure of an input document is retained with the connection of text chunks, tables, and figures. This representation allows the method to handle complex questions that require information from multimodalities. To confirm the efficiency of the graph modeling, a flexible RAG pipeline is developed using robust components. Experimental results on four benchmark test sets confirm the contribution of the layout-aware modeling for performance improvement of the RAG pipeline.

Document layout analysis is a known problem to the documents research community and has been vastly explored yielding a multitude of solutions ranging from text mining, and recognition to graph-based representation, visual feature extraction, etc. However, most of the existing works have ignored the crucial fact regarding the scarcity of labeled data. With growing internet connectivity to personal life, an enormous amount of documents had been available in the public domain and thus making data annotation a tedious task. We address this challenge using self-supervision and unlike, the few existing self-supervised document segmentation approaches which use text mining and textual labels, we use a complete vision-based approach in pre-training without any ground-truth label or its derivative. Instead, we generate pseudo-layouts from the document images to pre-train an image encoder to learn the document object representation and localization in a self-supervised framework before fine-tuning it with an object detection model. We show that our pipeline sets a new benchmark in this context and performs at par with the existing methods and the supervised counterparts, if not outperforms. The code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/MaitySubhajit/SelfDocSeg

Document layout analysis has a wide range of requirements across various domains, languages, and business scenarios. However, most current state-of-the-art algorithms are language-dependent, with architectures that rely on transformer encoders or language-specific text encoders, such as BERT, for feature extraction. These approaches are limited in their ability to handle very long documents due to input sequence length constraints and are closely tied to language-specific tokenizers. Additionally, training a cross-language text encoder can be challenging due to the lack of labeled multilingual document datasets that consider privacy. Furthermore, some layout tasks require a clean separation between different layout components without overlap, which can be difficult for image segmentation-based algorithms to achieve. In this paper, we present Paragraph2Graph, a language-independent graph neural network (GNN)-based model that achieves competitive results on common document layout datasets while being adaptable to business scenarios with strict separation. With only 19.95 million parameters, our model is suitable for industrial applications, particularly in multi-language scenarios.

Content-aware visual-textual presentation layout aims at arranging spatial space on the given canvas for pre-defined elements, including text, logo, and underlay, which is a key to automatic template-free creative graphic design. In practical applications, e.g., poster designs, the canvas is originally non-empty, and both inter-element relationships as well as inter-layer relationships should be concerned when generating a proper layout. A few recent works deal with them simultaneously, but they still suffer from poor graphic performance, such as a lack of layout variety or spatial non-alignment. Since content-aware visual-textual presentation layout is a novel task, we first construct a new dataset named PosterLayout, which consists of 9,974 poster-layout pairs and 905 images, i.e., non-empty canvases. It is more challenging and useful for greater layout variety, domain diversity, and content diversity. Then, we propose design sequence formation (DSF) that reorganizes elements in layouts to imitate the design processes of human designers, and a novel CNN-LSTM-based conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) is presented to generate proper layouts. Specifically, the discriminator is design-sequence-aware and will supervise the "design" process of the generator. Experimental results verify the usefulness of the new benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieves the best performance by generating suitable layouts for diverse canvases.

Graphic layout generation is a growing research area focusing on generating aesthetically pleasing layouts ranging from poster designs to documents. While recent research has explored ways to incorporate user constraints to guide the layout generation, these constraints often require complex specifications which reduce usability. We introduce an innovative approach exploiting user-provided sketches as intuitive constraints and we demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of this new guidance method, establishing the sketch-to-layout problem as a promising research direction, which is currently under-explored. To tackle the sketch-to-layout problem, we propose a multimodal transformer-based solution using the sketch and the content assets as inputs to produce high quality layouts. Since collecting sketch training data from human annotators to train our model is very costly, we introduce a novel and efficient method to synthetically generate training sketches at scale. We train and evaluate our model on three publicly available datasets: PubLayNet, DocLayNet and SlidesVQA, demonstrating that it outperforms state-of-the-art constraint-based methods, while offering a more intuitive design experience. In order to facilitate future sketch-to-layout research, we release O(200k) synthetically-generated sketches for the public datasets above. The datasets are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/sketch_to_layout.

Pre-training techniques have been verified successfully in a variety of NLP tasks in recent years. Despite the widespread use of pre-training models for NLP applications, they almost exclusively focus on text-level manipulation, while neglecting layout and style information that is vital for document image understanding. In this paper, we propose the LayoutLM to jointly model interactions between text and layout information across scanned document images, which is beneficial for a great number of real-world document image understanding tasks such as information extraction from scanned documents. Furthermore, we also leverage image features to incorporate words' visual information into LayoutLM. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that text and layout are jointly learned in a single framework for document-level pre-training. It achieves new state-of-the-art results in several downstream tasks, including form understanding (from 70.72 to 79.27), receipt understanding (from 94.02 to 95.24) and document image classification (from 93.07 to 94.42). The code and pre-trained LayoutLM models are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutlm.

Conditional graphic layout generation, which automatically maps user constraints to high-quality layouts, has attracted widespread attention today. Although recent works have achieved promising performance, the lack of versatility and data efficiency hinders their practical applications. In this work, we propose LayoutPrompter, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to address the above problems through in-context learning. LayoutPrompter is made up of three key components, namely input-output serialization, dynamic exemplar selection and layout ranking. Specifically, the input-output serialization component meticulously designs the input and output formats for each layout generation task. Dynamic exemplar selection is responsible for selecting the most helpful prompting exemplars for a given input. And a layout ranker is used to pick the highest quality layout from multiple outputs of LLMs. We conduct experiments on all existing layout generation tasks using four public datasets. Despite the simplicity of our approach, experimental results show that LayoutPrompter can compete with or even outperform state-of-the-art approaches on these tasks without any model training or fine-tuning. This demonstrates the effectiveness of this versatile and training-free approach. In addition, the ablation studies show that LayoutPrompter is significantly superior to the training-based baseline in a low-data regime, further indicating the data efficiency of LayoutPrompter. Our project is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LayoutGeneration/tree/main/LayoutPrompter.

Semi-structured documents integrate diverse interleaved data elements (e.g., tables, charts, hierarchical paragraphs) arranged in various and often irregular layouts. These documents are widely observed across domains and account for a large portion of real-world data. However, existing methods struggle to support natural language question answering over these documents due to three main technical challenges: (1) The elements extracted by techniques like OCR are often fragmented and stripped of their original semantic context, making them inadequate for analysis. (2) Existing approaches lack effective representations to capture hierarchical structures within documents (e.g., associating tables with nested chapter titles) and to preserve layout-specific distinctions (e.g., differentiating sidebars from main content). (3) Answering questions often requires retrieving and aligning relevant information scattered across multiple regions or pages, such as linking a descriptive paragraph to table cells located elsewhere in the document. To address these issues, we propose MoDora, an LLM-powered system for semi-structured document analysis. First, we adopt a local-alignment aggregation strategy to convert OCR-parsed elements into layout-aware components, and conduct type-specific information extraction for components with hierarchical titles or non-text elements. Second, we design the Component-Correlation Tree (CCTree) to hierarchically organize components, explicitly modeling inter-component relations and layout distinctions through a bottom-up cascade summarization process. Finally, we propose a question-type-aware retrieval strategy that supports (1) layout-based grid partitioning for location-based retrieval and (2) LLM-guided pruning for semantic-based retrieval. Experiments show MoDora outperforms baselines by 5.97%-61.07% in accuracy. The code is at https://github.com/weAIDB/MoDora.

Layout generation is the foundation task of intelligent design, which requires the integration of visual aesthetics and harmonious expression of content delivery. However, existing methods still face challenges in generating precise and visually appealing layouts, including blocking, overlap, or spatial misalignment between layouts, which are closely related to the spatial structure of graphic layouts. We find that these methods overly focus on content information and lack constraints on layout spatial structure, resulting in an imbalance of learning content-aware and graphic-aware features. To tackle this issue, we propose Content and Graphic Balance Layout Generation with Transformer-based Diffusion Model (CGB-DM). Specifically, we first design a regulator that balances the predicted content and graphic weight, overcoming the tendency of paying more attention to the content on canvas. Secondly, we introduce a graphic constraint of saliency bounding box to further enhance the alignment of geometric features between layout representations and images. In addition, we adapt a transformer-based diffusion model as the backbone, whose powerful generation capability ensures the quality in layout generation. Extensive experimental results indicate that our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our model framework can also be expanded to other graphic design fields.

Recent years have witnessed the rise and success of pre-training techniques in visually-rich document understanding. However, most existing methods lack the systematic mining and utilization of layout-centered knowledge, leading to sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-Layout, a novel document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow, to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. Specifically, we first rearrange input sequences in the serialization stage, and then present a correlative pre-training task, reading order prediction, to learn the proper reading order of documents. To improve the layout awareness of the model, we integrate a spatial-aware disentangled attention into the multi-modal transformer and a replaced regions prediction task into the pre-training phase. Experimental results show that ERNIE-Layout achieves superior performance on various downstream tasks, setting new state-of-the-art on key information extraction, document image classification, and document question answering datasets. The code and models are publicly available at http://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleNLP/tree/develop/model_zoo/ernie-layout.

We propose a new generative model for layout generation. We generate layouts in three steps. First, we generate the layout elements as nodes in a layout graph. Second, we compute constraints between layout elements as edges in the layout graph. Third, we solve for the final layout using constrained optimization. For the first two steps, we build on recent transformer architectures. The layout optimization implements the constraints efficiently. We show three practical contributions compared to the state of the art: our work requires no user input, produces higher quality layouts, and enables many novel capabilities for conditional layout generation.

Academic project websites can more effectively disseminate research when they clearly present core content and enable intuitive navigation and interaction. However, current approaches such as direct Large Language Model (LLM) generation, templates, or direct HTML conversion struggle to produce layout-aware, interactive sites, and a comprehensive evaluation suite for this task has been lacking. In this paper, we introduce Paper2Web, a benchmark dataset and multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing academic webpage generation. It incorporates rule-based metrics like Connectivity, Completeness and human-verified LLM-as-a-Judge (covering interactivity, aesthetics, and informativeness), and PaperQuiz, which measures paper-level knowledge retention. We further present PWAgent, an autonomous pipeline that converts scientific papers into interactive and multimedia-rich academic homepages. The agent iteratively refines both content and layout through MCP tools that enhance emphasis, balance, and presentation quality. Our experiments show that PWAgent consistently outperforms end-to-end baselines like template-based webpages and arXiv/alphaXiv versions by a large margin while maintaining low cost, achieving the Pareto-front in academic webpage generation.

Generative models able to synthesize layouts of different kinds (e.g. documents, user interfaces or furniture arrangements) are a useful tool to aid design processes and as a first step in the generation of synthetic data, among other tasks. We exploit the properties of self-attention layers to capture high level relationships between elements in a layout, and use these as the building blocks of the well-known Variational Autoencoder (VAE) formulation. Our proposed Variational Transformer Network (VTN) is capable of learning margins, alignments and other global design rules without explicit supervision. Layouts sampled from our model have a high degree of resemblance to the training data, while demonstrating appealing diversity. In an extensive evaluation on publicly available benchmarks for different layout types VTNs achieve state-of-the-art diversity and perceptual quality. Additionally, we show the capabilities of this method as part of a document layout detection pipeline.

Layout generation aims to synthesize realistic graphic scenes consisting of elements with different attributes including category, size, position, and between-element relation. It is a crucial task for reducing the burden on heavy-duty graphic design works for formatted scenes, e.g., publications, documents, and user interfaces (UIs). Diverse application scenarios impose a big challenge in unifying various layout generation subtasks, including conditional and unconditional generation. In this paper, we propose a Layout Diffusion Generative Model (LDGM) to achieve such unification with a single decoupled diffusion model. LDGM views a layout of arbitrary missing or coarse element attributes as an intermediate diffusion status from a completed layout. Since different attributes have their individual semantics and characteristics, we propose to decouple the diffusion processes for them to improve the diversity of training samples and learn the reverse process jointly to exploit global-scope contexts for facilitating generation. As a result, our LDGM can generate layouts either from scratch or conditional on arbitrary available attributes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate our proposed LDGM outperforms existing layout generation models in both functionality and performance.

Recently, state-of-the-art text-to-image generation models, such as Flux and Ideogram 2.0, have made significant progress in sentence-level visual text rendering. In this paper, we focus on the more challenging scenarios of article-level visual text rendering and address a novel task of generating high-quality business content, including infographics and slides, based on user provided article-level descriptive prompts and ultra-dense layouts. The fundamental challenges are twofold: significantly longer context lengths and the scarcity of high-quality business content data. In contrast to most previous works that focus on a limited number of sub-regions and sentence-level prompts, ensuring precise adherence to ultra-dense layouts with tens or even hundreds of sub-regions in business content is far more challenging. We make two key technical contributions: (i) the construction of scalable, high-quality business content dataset, i.e., Infographics-650K, equipped with ultra-dense layouts and prompts by implementing a layer-wise retrieval-augmented infographic generation scheme; and (ii) a layout-guided cross attention scheme, which injects tens of region-wise prompts into a set of cropped region latent space according to the ultra-dense layouts, and refine each sub-regions flexibly during inference using a layout conditional CFG. We demonstrate the strong results of our system compared to previous SOTA systems such as Flux and SD3 on our BizEval prompt set. Additionally, we conduct thorough ablation experiments to verify the effectiveness of each component. We hope our constructed Infographics-650K and BizEval can encourage the broader community to advance the progress of business content generation.

Large ground-truth datasets and recent advances in deep learning techniques have been useful for layout detection. However, because of the restricted layout diversity of these datasets, training on them requires a sizable number of annotated instances, which is both expensive and time-consuming. As a result, differences between the source and target domains may significantly impact how well these models function. To solve this problem, domain adaptation approaches have been developed that use a small quantity of labeled data to adjust the model to the target domain. In this research, we introduced a synthetic document dataset called RanLayNet, enriched with automatically assigned labels denoting spatial positions, ranges, and types of layout elements. The primary aim of this endeavor is to develop a versatile dataset capable of training models with robustness and adaptability to diverse document formats. Through empirical experimentation, we demonstrate that a deep layout identification model trained on our dataset exhibits enhanced performance compared to a model trained solely on actual documents. Moreover, we conduct a comparative analysis by fine-tuning inference models using both PubLayNet and IIIT-AR-13K datasets on the Doclaynet dataset. Our findings emphasize that models enriched with our dataset are optimal for tasks such as achieving 0.398 and 0.588 mAP95 score in the scientific document domain for the TABLE class.

Document structure analysis (aka document layout analysis) is crucial for understanding the physical layout and logical structure of documents, with applications in information retrieval, document summarization, knowledge extraction, etc. In this paper, we concentrate on Hierarchical Document Structure Analysis (HDSA) to explore hierarchical relationships within structured documents created using authoring software employing hierarchical schemas, such as LaTeX, Microsoft Word, and HTML. To comprehensively analyze hierarchical document structures, we propose a tree construction based approach that addresses multiple subtasks concurrently, including page object detection (Detect), reading order prediction of identified objects (Order), and the construction of intended hierarchical structure (Construct). We present an effective end-to-end solution based on this framework to demonstrate its performance. To assess our approach, we develop a comprehensive benchmark called Comp-HRDoc, which evaluates the above subtasks simultaneously. Our end-to-end system achieves state-of-the-art performance on two large-scale document layout analysis datasets (PubLayNet and DocLayNet), a high-quality hierarchical document structure reconstruction dataset (HRDoc), and our Comp-HRDoc benchmark. The Comp-HRDoc benchmark will be released to facilitate further research in this field.

The diffusion model has been proven a powerful generative model in recent years, yet remains a challenge in generating visual text. Several methods alleviated this issue by incorporating explicit text position and content as guidance on where and what text to render. However, these methods still suffer from several drawbacks, such as limited flexibility and automation, constrained capability of layout prediction, and restricted style diversity. In this paper, we present TextDiffuser-2, aiming to unleash the power of language models for text rendering. Firstly, we fine-tune a large language model for layout planning. The large language model is capable of automatically generating keywords for text rendering and also supports layout modification through chatting. Secondly, we utilize the language model within the diffusion model to encode the position and texts at the line level. Unlike previous methods that employed tight character-level guidance, this approach generates more diverse text images. We conduct extensive experiments and incorporate user studies involving human participants as well as GPT-4V, validating TextDiffuser-2's capacity to achieve a more rational text layout and generation with enhanced diversity. The code and model will be available at https://aka.ms/textdiffuser-2.

Layout-guided text-to-image models offer greater control over the generation process by explicitly conditioning image synthesis on the spatial arrangement of elements. As a result, their adoption has increased in many computer vision applications, ranging from content creation to synthetic data generation. A critical challenge is achieving precise alignment between the image, textual prompt, and layout, ensuring semantic fidelity and spatial accuracy. Although recent benchmarks assess text alignment, layout alignment remains overlooked, and no existing benchmark jointly evaluates both. This gap limits the ability to evaluate a model's spatial fidelity, which is crucial when using layout-guided generation for synthetic data, as errors can introduce noise and degrade data quality. In this work, we introduce 7Bench, the first benchmark to assess both semantic and spatial alignment in layout-guided text-to-image generation. It features text-and-layout pairs spanning seven challenging scenarios, investigating object generation, color fidelity, attribute recognition, inter-object relationships, and spatial control. We propose an evaluation protocol that builds on existing frameworks by incorporating the layout alignment score to assess spatial accuracy. Using 7Bench, we evaluate several state-of-the-art diffusion models, uncovering their respective strengths and limitations across diverse alignment tasks. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/Elizzo/7Bench.

Diffusion models have been recognized for their ability to generate images that are not only visually appealing but also of high artistic quality. As a result, Layout-to-Image (L2I) generation has been proposed to leverage region-specific positions and descriptions to enable more precise and controllable generation. However, previous methods primarily focus on UNet-based models (e.g., SD1.5 and SDXL), and limited effort has explored Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiTs), which have demonstrated powerful image generation capabilities. Enabling MM-DiT for layout-to-image generation seems straightforward but is challenging due to the complexity of how layout is introduced, integrated, and balanced among multiple modalities. To this end, we explore various network variants to efficiently incorporate layout guidance into MM-DiT, and ultimately present SiamLayout. To Inherit the advantages of MM-DiT, we use a separate set of network weights to process the layout, treating it as equally important as the image and text modalities. Meanwhile, to alleviate the competition among modalities, we decouple the image-layout interaction into a siamese branch alongside the image-text one and fuse them in the later stage. Moreover, we contribute a large-scale layout dataset, named LayoutSAM, which includes 2.7 million image-text pairs and 10.7 million entities. Each entity is annotated with a bounding box and a detailed description. We further construct the LayoutSAM-Eval benchmark as a comprehensive tool for evaluating the L2I generation quality. Finally, we introduce the Layout Designer, which taps into the potential of large language models in layout planning, transforming them into experts in layout generation and optimization. Our code, model, and dataset will be available at https://creatilayout.github.io.

Document Layout Parsing serves as a critical gateway for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to access and interpret the world's vast stores of structured knowledge. This process,which encompasses layout detection, text recognition, and relational understanding, is particularly crucial for empowering next-generation Vision-Language Models. Current methods, however, rely on fragmented, multi-stage pipelines that suffer from error propagation and fail to leverage the synergies of joint training. In this paper, we introduce dots.ocr, a single Vision-Language Model that, for the first time, demonstrates the advantages of jointly learning three core tasks within a unified, end-to-end framework. This is made possible by a highly scalable data engine that synthesizes a vast multilingual corpus, empowering the model to deliver robust performance across a wide array of tasks, encompassing diverse languages, layouts, and domains. The efficacy of our unified paradigm is validated by state-of-the-art performance on the comprehensive OmniDocBench. Furthermore, to catalyze research in global document intelligence, we introduce XDocParse, a challenging new benchmark spanning 126 languages. On this testbed, dots.ocr establishes a powerful new baseline, outperforming the next-best competitor by a remarkable +7.4 point margin and proving its unparalleled multilingual capabilities.

Despite recent advances in text-to-image generation, models still struggle to accurately render prompt-specified text with correct spatial layout -- especially in multi-span, structured settings. This challenge is driven not only by the lack of datasets that align prompts with the exact text and layout expected in the image, but also by the absence of effective metrics for evaluating layout quality. To address these issues, we introduce TextGround4M, a large-scale dataset of over 4 million prompt-image pairs, each annotated with span-level text grounded in the prompt and corresponding bounding boxes. This enables fine-grained supervision for layout-aware, prompt-grounded text rendering. Building on this, we propose a lightweight training strategy for autoregressive T2I models that appends layout-aware span tokens during training, without altering model architecture or inference behavior. We further construct a benchmark with stratified layout complexity to evaluate both open-source and proprietary models in a zero-shot setting. In addition, we introduce two layout-aware metrics to address the long-standing lack of spatial evaluation in text rendering. Our results show that models trained on TextGround4M outperform strong baselines in text fidelity, spatial accuracy, and prompt consistency, highlighting the importance of fine-grained layout supervision for grounded T2I generation.

Comprehending natural language instructions is a charming property for both 2D and 3D layout synthesis systems. Existing methods implicitly model object joint distributions and express object relations, hindering generation's controllability. We introduce InstructLayout, a novel generative framework that integrates a semantic graph prior and a layout decoder to improve controllability and fidelity for 2D and 3D layout synthesis. The proposed semantic graph prior learns layout appearances and object distributions simultaneously, demonstrating versatility across various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. To facilitate the benchmarking for text-driven 2D and 3D scene synthesis, we respectively curate two high-quality datasets of layout-instruction pairs from public Internet resources with large language and multimodal models. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in both 2D and 3D layout synthesis tasks. Thorough ablation studies confirm the efficacy of crucial design components.

Recent advances in transformers have enabled Table Question Answering (Table QA) systems to achieve high accuracy and SOTA results on open domain datasets like WikiTableQuestions and WikiSQL. Such transformers are frequently pre-trained on open-domain content such as Wikipedia, where they effectively encode questions and corresponding tables from Wikipedia as seen in Table QA dataset. However, web tables in Wikipedia are notably flat in their layout, with the first row as the sole column header. The layout lends to a relational view of tables where each row is a tuple. Whereas, tables in domain-specific business or scientific documents often have a much more complex layout, including hierarchical row and column headers, in addition to having specialized vocabulary terms from that domain. To address this problem, we introduce the domain-specific Table QA dataset AIT-QA (Airline Industry Table QA). The dataset consists of 515 questions authored by human annotators on 116 tables extracted from public U.S. SEC filings (publicly available at: https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml) of major airline companies for the fiscal years 2017-2019. We also provide annotations pertaining to the nature of questions, marking those that require hierarchical headers, domain-specific terminology, and paraphrased forms. Our zero-shot baseline evaluation of three transformer-based SOTA Table QA methods - TaPAS (end-to-end), TaBERT (semantic parsing-based), and RCI (row-column encoding-based) - clearly exposes the limitation of these methods in this practical setting, with the best accuracy at just 51.8\% (RCI). We also present pragmatic table preprocessing steps used to pivot and project these complex tables into a layout suitable for the SOTA Table QA models.

Recent advances in document image analysis (DIA) have been primarily driven by the application of neural networks. Ideally, research outcomes could be easily deployed in production and extended for further investigation. However, various factors like loosely organized codebases and sophisticated model configurations complicate the easy reuse of important innovations by a wide audience. Though there have been on-going efforts to improve reusability and simplify deep learning (DL) model development in disciplines like natural language processing and computer vision, none of them are optimized for challenges in the domain of DIA. This represents a major gap in the existing toolkit, as DIA is central to academic research across a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This paper introduces layoutparser, an open-source library for streamlining the usage of DL in DIA research and applications. The core layoutparser library comes with a set of simple and intuitive interfaces for applying and customizing DL models for layout detection, character recognition, and many other document processing tasks. To promote extensibility, layoutparser also incorporates a community platform for sharing both pre-trained models and full document digitization pipelines. We demonstrate that layoutparser is helpful for both lightweight and large-scale digitization pipelines in real-word use cases. The library is publicly available at https://layout-parser.github.io/.

Automatic generation of graphical layouts is crucial for many real-world applications, including designing posters, flyers, advertisements, and graphical user interfaces. Given the incredible ability of Large language models (LLMs) in both natural language understanding and generation, we believe that we could customize an LLM to help people create compelling graphical layouts starting with only text instructions from the user. We call our method TextLap (text-based layout planning). It uses a curated instruction-based layout planning dataset (InsLap) to customize LLMs as a graphic designer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TextLap and show that it outperforms strong baselines, including GPT-4 based methods, for image generation and graphical design benchmarks.

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

Webpages have been a rich resource for language and vision-language tasks. Yet only pieces of webpages are kept: image-caption pairs, long text articles, or raw HTML, never all in one place. Webpage tasks have resultingly received little attention and structured image-text data underused. To study multimodal webpage understanding, we introduce the Wikipedia Webpage 2M (WikiWeb2M) suite; the first to retain the full set of images, text, and structure data available in a page. WikiWeb2M can be used for tasks like page description generation, section summarization, and contextual image captioning.

The layout of a mobile screen is a critical data source for UI design research and semantic understanding of the screen. However, UI layouts in existing datasets are often noisy, have mismatches with their visual representation, or consists of generic or app-specific types that are difficult to analyze and model. In this paper, we propose the CLAY pipeline that uses a deep learning approach for denoising UI layouts, allowing us to automatically improve existing mobile UI layout datasets at scale. Our pipeline takes both the screenshot and the raw UI layout, and annotates the raw layout by removing incorrect nodes and assigning a semantically meaningful type to each node. To experiment with our data-cleaning pipeline, we create the CLAY dataset of 59,555 human-annotated screen layouts, based on screenshots and raw layouts from Rico, a public mobile UI corpus. Our deep models achieve high accuracy with F1 scores of 82.7% for detecting layout objects that do not have a valid visual representation and 85.9% for recognizing object types, which significantly outperforms a heuristic baseline. Our work lays a foundation for creating large-scale high quality UI layout datasets for data-driven mobile UI research and reduces the need of manual labeling efforts that are prohibitively expensive.

We introduce WordScape, a novel pipeline for the creation of cross-disciplinary, multilingual corpora comprising millions of pages with annotations for document layout detection. Relating visual and textual items on document pages has gained further significance with the advent of multimodal models. Various approaches proved effective for visual question answering or layout segmentation. However, the interplay of text, tables, and visuals remains challenging for a variety of document understanding tasks. In particular, many models fail to generalize well to diverse domains and new languages due to insufficient availability of training data. WordScape addresses these limitations. Our automatic annotation pipeline parses the Open XML structure of Word documents obtained from the web, jointly providing layout-annotated document images and their textual representations. In turn, WordScape offers unique properties as it (1) leverages the ubiquity of the Word file format on the internet, (2) is readily accessible through the Common Crawl web corpus, (3) is adaptive to domain-specific documents, and (4) offers culturally and linguistically diverse document pages with natural semantic structure and high-quality text. Together with the pipeline, we will additionally release 9.5M urls to word documents which can be processed using WordScape to create a dataset of over 40M pages. Finally, we investigate the quality of text and layout annotations extracted by WordScape, assess the impact on document understanding benchmarks, and demonstrate that manual labeling costs can be substantially reduced.

Designing adaptive documents that are visually appealing across various devices and for diverse viewers is a challenging task. This is due to the wide variety of devices and different viewer requirements and preferences. Alterations to a document's content, style, or layout often necessitate numerous adjustments, potentially leading to a complete layout redesign. We introduce FlexDoc, a framework for creating and consuming documents that seamlessly adapt to different devices, author, and viewer preferences and interactions. It eliminates the need for manually creating multiple document layouts, as FlexDoc enables authors to define desired document properties using templates and employs both discrete and continuous optimization in a novel comprehensive optimization process, which leverages automatic text summarization and image carving techniques to adapt both layout and content during consumption dynamically. Furthermore, we demonstrate FlexDoc in multiple real-world application scenarios, such as news readers and academic papers.

This paper defines and explores the design space for information extraction (IE) from layout-rich documents using large language models (LLMs). The three core challenges of layout-aware IE with LLMs are 1) data structuring, 2) model engagement, and 3) output refinement. Our study delves into the sub-problems within these core challenges, such as input representation, chunking, prompting, and selection of LLMs and multimodal models. It examines the outcomes of different design choices through a new layout-aware IE test suite, benchmarking against the state-of-art (SoA) model LayoutLMv3. The results show that the configuration from one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) trial achieves near-optimal results with 14.1 points F1-score gain from the baseline model, while full factorial exploration yields only a slightly higher 15.1 points gain at around 36x greater token usage. We demonstrate that well-configured general-purpose LLMs can match the performance of specialized models, providing a cost-effective alternative. Our test-suite is freely available at https://github.com/gayecolakoglu/LayIE-LLM.

Synthesizing images with user-specified subjects has received growing attention due to its practical applications. Despite the recent success in single subject customization, existing algorithms suffer from high training cost and low success rate along with increased number of subjects. Towards controllable image synthesis with multiple subjects as the constraints, this work studies how to efficiently represent a particular subject as well as how to appropriately compose different subjects. We find that the text embedding regarding the subject token already serves as a simple yet effective representation that supports arbitrary combinations without any model tuning. Through learning a residual on top of the base embedding, we manage to robustly shift the raw subject to the customized subject given various text conditions. We then propose to employ layout, a very abstract and easy-to-obtain prior, as the spatial guidance for subject arrangement. By rectifying the activations in the cross-attention map, the layout appoints and separates the location of different subjects in the image, significantly alleviating the interference across them. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate our superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives under a variety of settings for multi-subject customization.

The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have stimulated interest among researchers and industry professionals, particularly in their application to tasks concerning mobile user interfaces (UIs). This position paper investigates the use of LLMs for UI layout generation. Central to our exploration is the introduction of UI grammar -- a novel approach we proposed to represent the hierarchical structure inherent in UI screens. The aim of this approach is to guide the generative capacities of LLMs more effectively and improve the explainability and controllability of the process. Initial experiments conducted with GPT-4 showed the promising capability of LLMs to produce high-quality user interfaces via in-context learning. Furthermore, our preliminary comparative study suggested the potential of the grammar-based approach in improving the quality of generative results in specific aspects.

Key information extraction (KIE) from document images requires understanding the contextual and spatial semantics of texts in two-dimensional (2D) space. Many recent studies try to solve the task by developing pre-trained language models focusing on combining visual features from document images with texts and their layout. On the other hand, this paper tackles the problem by going back to the basic: effective combination of text and layout. Specifically, we propose a pre-trained language model, named BROS (BERT Relying On Spatiality), that encodes relative positions of texts in 2D space and learns from unlabeled documents with area-masking strategy. With this optimized training scheme for understanding texts in 2D space, BROS shows comparable or better performance compared to previous methods on four KIE benchmarks (FUNSD, SROIE*, CORD, and SciTSR) without relying on visual features. This paper also reveals two real-world challenges in KIE tasks-(1) minimizing the error from incorrect text ordering and (2) efficient learning from fewer downstream examples-and demonstrates the superiority of BROS over previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/bros.

Despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for visual document understanding (VDU), visual information extraction (VIE) from relation-rich documents remains challenging due to the layout diversity and limited training data. While existing synthetic document generators attempt to address data scarcity, they either rely on manually designed layouts and templates, or adopt rule-based approaches that limit layout diversity. Besides, current layout generation methods focus solely on topological patterns without considering textual content, making them impractical for generating documents with complex associations between the contents and layouts. In this paper, we propose a Relation-rIch visual Document GEnerator (RIDGE) that addresses these limitations through a two-stage approach: (1) Content Generation, which leverages LLMs to generate document content using a carefully designed Hierarchical Structure Text format which captures entity categories and relationships, and (2) Content-driven Layout Generation, which learns to create diverse, plausible document layouts solely from easily available Optical Character Recognition (OCR) results, requiring no human labeling or annotations efforts. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method significantly enhances the performance of document understanding models on various VIE benchmarks. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/AI-Application-and-Integration-Lab/RIDGE .

Spatial control is a core capability in controllable image generation. Advancements in layout-guided image generation have shown promising results on in-distribution (ID) datasets with similar spatial configurations. However, it is unclear how these models perform when facing out-of-distribution (OOD) samples with arbitrary, unseen layouts. In this paper, we propose LayoutBench, a diagnostic benchmark for layout-guided image generation that examines four categories of spatial control skills: number, position, size, and shape. We benchmark two recent representative layout-guided image generation methods and observe that the good ID layout control may not generalize well to arbitrary layouts in the wild (e.g., objects at the boundary). Next, we propose IterInpaint, a new baseline that generates foreground and background regions in a step-by-step manner via inpainting, demonstrating stronger generalizability than existing models on OOD layouts in LayoutBench. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluation and fine-grained analysis on the four LayoutBench skills to pinpoint the weaknesses of existing models. Lastly, we show comprehensive ablation studies on IterInpaint, including training task ratio, crop&paste vs. repaint, and generation order. Project website: https://layoutbench.github.io

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 https://aka.ms/layoutlmv2.

Graphic layouts serve as an important and engaging medium for visual communication across different channels. While recent layout generation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities, they frequently fail to align with nuanced human aesthetic judgment. Existing preference datasets and reward models trained on text-to-image generation do not generalize to layout evaluation, where the spatial arrangement of identical elements determines quality. To address this critical gap, we introduce DesignSense-10k, a large-scale dataset of 10,235 human-annotated preference pairs for graphic layout evaluation. We propose a five-stage curation pipeline that generates visually coherent layout transformations across diverse aspect ratios, using semantic grouping, layout prediction, filtering, clustering, and VLM-based refinement to produce high-quality comparison pairs. Human preferences are annotated using a 4-class scheme (left, right, both good, both bad) to capture subjective ambiguity. Leveraging this dataset, we train DesignSense, a vision-language model-based classifier that substantially outperforms existing open-source and proprietary models across comprehensive evaluation metrics (54.6% improvement in Macro F1 over the strongest proprietary baseline). Our analysis shows that frontier VLMs remain unreliable overall and fail catastrophically on the full four-class task, underscoring the need for specialized, preference-aware models. Beyond the dataset, our reward model DesignSense yields tangible downstream gains in layout generation. Using our judge during RL based training improves generator win rate by about 3%, while inference-time scaling, which involves generating multiple candidates and selecting the best one, provides a 3.6% improvement. These results highlight the practical impact of specialized, layout-aware preference modeling on real-world layout generation quality.

This paper highlights the need to bring document classification benchmarking closer to real-world applications, both in the nature of data tested (X: multi-channel, multi-paged, multi-industry; Y: class distributions and label set variety) and in classification tasks considered (f: multi-page document, page stream, and document bundle classification, ...). We identify the lack of public multi-page document classification datasets, formalize different classification tasks arising in application scenarios, and motivate the value of targeting efficient multi-page document representations. An experimental study on proposed multi-page document classification datasets demonstrates that current benchmarks have become irrelevant and need to be updated to evaluate complete documents, as they naturally occur in practice. This reality check also calls for more mature evaluation methodologies, covering calibration evaluation, inference complexity (time-memory), and a range of realistic distribution shifts (e.g., born-digital vs. scanning noise, shifting page order). Our study ends on a hopeful note by recommending concrete avenues for future improvements.}

Document layout analysis usually relies on computer vision models to understand documents while ignoring textual information that is vital to capture. Meanwhile, high quality labeled datasets with both visual and textual information are still insufficient. In this paper, we present DocBank, a benchmark dataset that contains 500K document pages with fine-grained token-level annotations for document layout analysis. DocBank is constructed using a simple yet effective way with weak supervision from the documents available on the arXiv.com. With DocBank, models from different modalities can be compared fairly and multi-modal approaches will be further investigated and boost the performance of document layout analysis. We build several strong baselines and manually split train/dev/test sets for evaluation. Experiment results show that models trained on DocBank accurately recognize the layout information for a variety of documents. The DocBank dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/doc-analysis/DocBank.

Content-aware layout generation is a critical task in graphic design automation, focused on creating visually appealing arrangements of elements that seamlessly blend with a given background image. The variety of real-world applications makes it highly challenging to develop a single model capable of unifying the diverse range of input-constrained generation sub-tasks, such as those conditioned by element types, sizes, or their relationships. Current methods either address only a subset of these tasks or necessitate separate model parameters for different conditions, failing to offer a truly unified solution. In this paper, we propose UniLayDiff: a Unified Diffusion Transformer, that for the first time, addresses various content-aware layout generation tasks with a single, end-to-end trainable model. Specifically, we treat layout constraints as a distinct modality and employ Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer framework to capture the complex interplay between the background image, layout elements, and diverse constraints. Moreover, we integrate relation constraints through fine-tuning the model with LoRA after pretraining the model on other tasks. Such a schema not only achieves unified conditional generation but also enhances overall layout quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniLayDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance across from unconditional to various conditional generation tasks and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first model to unify the full range of content-aware layout generation tasks.

Controllable layout generation aims at synthesizing plausible arrangement of element bounding boxes with optional constraints, such as type or position of a specific element. In this work, we try to solve a broad range of layout generation tasks in a single model that is based on discrete state-space diffusion models. Our model, named LayoutDM, naturally handles the structured layout data in the discrete representation and learns to progressively infer a noiseless layout from the initial input, where we model the layout corruption process by modality-wise discrete diffusion. For conditional generation, we propose to inject layout constraints in the form of masking or logit adjustment during inference. We show in the experiments that our LayoutDM successfully generates high-quality layouts and outperforms both task-specific and task-agnostic baselines on several layout tasks.

Visual layouts are essential in graphic design fields such as advertising, posters, and web interfaces. The application of generative models for content-aware layout generation has recently gained traction. However, these models fail to understand the contextual aesthetic requirements of layout design and do not align with human-like preferences, primarily treating it as a prediction task without considering the final rendered output. To overcome these problems, we offer Aesthetic-Aware Preference Alignment(AAPA), a novel technique to train a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) for layout prediction that uses MLLM's aesthetic preferences for Direct Preference Optimization over graphic layouts. We propose a data filtering protocol utilizing our layout-quality heuristics for AAPA to ensure training happens on high-quality layouts. Additionally, we introduce a novel evaluation metric that uses another MLLM to compute the win rate of the generated layout against the ground-truth layout based on aesthetics criteria. We also demonstrate the applicability of AAPA for MLLMs of varying scales (1B to 8B parameters) and LLM families (Qwen, Phi, InternLM). By conducting thorough qualitative and quantitative analyses, we verify the efficacy of our approach on two challenging benchmarks - Crello and Webui, showcasing 17%, and 16 improvement over current State-of-The-Art methods, thereby highlighting the potential of MLLMs in aesthetic-aware layout generation.

Finding a suitable layout represents a crucial task for diverse applications in graphic design. Motivated by simpler and smoother sampling trajectories, we explore the use of Flow Matching as an alternative to current diffusion-based layout generation models. Specifically, we propose LayoutFlow, an efficient flow-based model capable of generating high-quality layouts. Instead of progressively denoising the elements of a noisy layout, our method learns to gradually move, or flow, the elements of an initial sample until it reaches its final prediction. In addition, we employ a conditioning scheme that allows us to handle various generation tasks with varying degrees of conditioning with a single model. Empirically, LayoutFlow performs on par with state-of-the-art models while being significantly faster.