arXiv AI

Beyond Accuracy: Robustness, Cost, and Governance Trade-offs for Vision-Language Models in Templated Document Extraction

The paper evaluates eleven vision‑language models (VLMs) for extracting structured fields from business documents, focusing on robustness, cost, and governance rather than just accuracy. Using a held‑out set of 750 synthetic checks, the study finds that fine‑tuning open‑source VLMs on 3,000 samples yields an F1 score above 0.98, surpassing all zero‑shot commercial systems, while GPT‑5 tops the commercial group and Claude Sonnet 4.5 fails on date extraction. The authors also present a practitioner‑oriented selection framework that maps task profiles—such as quality, latency, governance, and volume—to recommended approaches via filtering and total‑cost minimization, demonstrated on a mid‑volume document‑extraction scenario.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Evaluating Structured Information Extraction with Open Models in a High Risk Public Sector Application

The paper evaluates open-source OCR, LLM, and VLM systems on a high‑risk public sector task: extracting structured data from student application documents. Results show that VLMs generally outperform OCR+LLM pipelines, yet only 4 of 35 configurations achieve F1 scores above 0.5, with most combinations scoring below 0.25. Model size and input quality, especially preserving OCR structure, are critical factors influencing performance.

By Elias Schubert, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Closing Cost-Quality Gap in Document VLMs: Difficulty-Aware Data Curation and Quality-Adjusted Deployment Economics

arXiv:2609.01575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extracting structured fields from hundreds of millions of documents annually remains costly in regulated industries: bespoke OCR cascades cover only a...

By Maksim Evdokimov, Matvey Ivanov, Dmitrii Tsiupin, Olga Tsymboi, Anatolii Potapov, Aleksandr Ivanov
arXiv AI
Jul 21

DocOCR-Eval: A Correction-Based Framework for OCR Tool Selection Without Ground Truth

arXiv:2607. 16203v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document parsing is a foundational step for document understanding tasks such as visual question answering and key information extraction, as it transforms unstructured scanned images into structured representations by extracting textual, visual, and layout information.

By Zihan Xu, Puzhen Wu, Lawrence Chun Man Lau, Wei Liu, Sirui Li, Yifan Peng, Yihao Ding
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

How Robust is OCR-Reasoning? Evaluating OCR-Reasoning Robustness of Vision-Language Models under Visual Perturbations

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-based benchmarks and increasingly focused on text-rich understanding, but their robustness under controlled visual degradation remains insufficiently understood. This gap is critical for OCR reasoning, where visual corruption can induce OCR errors and structural distortions, thereby introducing uncertainty into the reasoning task.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Dr. DocBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Expert-Level and Difficult Document Parsing

arXiv:2606. 01393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document parsing and recognition are fundamental capabilities for vision-language models (VLMs) and document processing systems.

By Minglai Yang, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Pengyuan Li, Xinyu Guo, Zhenting Qi, Konwoo Kim, Longtian Ye, Xiaolong Luo, Jinhe Bi, Henry Zhang, Haris Riaz, Xuan Zhang, Yunze Xiao, Bangya Liu, Tom Tang, Yunfei Zhao, Qunshu Lin, Zihan Wang, Minghao Liu, Michael Lingzhi Li, Yilun Du, Jesse Thomason, Rogerio Feris, Alex Pentland, Zexue He
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Identify, Locate, Link: End-to-End Key-Value Extraction from Document Images

arXiv:2608.20868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document processing pipelines traditionally cascade optical character recognition (OCR) engines with downstream models for structured information ext...

By A. Said Gurbuz (IBM Research Zurich, ETH Zurich), Ahmed Nassar (IBM Research Zurich), Christoph Auer (IBM Research Zurich), Maksym Lysak (IBM Research Zurich), Lucas Morin (IBM Research Zurich), Matteo Omenetti (IBM Research Zurich), Tim Strohmeyer (IBM Research Zurich), Panagiotis Vagenas (IBM Research Zurich), Nikolaos Livathinos (IBM Research Zurich), Michele Dolfi (IBM Research Zurich), Peter Staar (IBM Research Zurich)
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Making Every Tool Call Count: Necessary Tool-Evidence Path Rewards for Agentic Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces the Necessary Tool‑Evidence Path (NTEP) annotation scheme and its associated reward mechanism (NTEP‑R) to better supervise vision‑language models that use external tools. By explicitly specifying which evidence is needed and penalizing redundant tool calls, the authors train an 8B‑parameter model that shows improved accuracy and tool‑use efficiency across seven image‑grounded benchmarks. The approach demonstrates that fine‑grained supervision of tool‑evidence paths is essential for robust agentic VLM performance.

By Xingming Long, Yu Liu, Zhiwei Yang, Hanqi Feng, Shaojie Zhang, Barnabas Poczos, Chao Jiang, Zhenbo Luo, Lei Jiang, Pei Fu