arXiv Machine Learning

Pre-Inference Routing for Cost-Efficient Document Field Extraction

arXiv:2608. 06607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most document-extraction systems use a single model for all documents.

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
Sep 15

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.

By Kushal Patel, Pushkal Shrivastava, Mackenzie Lees, Qirui Lu, Bhargobjyoti Saikia, Liying Li, Junlin Jiang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Measuring Artifact Reliance in Machine-Generated Text Detectors

The study evaluates machine‑generated text detectors on scientific literature, finding that many detectors perform near perfectly on certain benchmarks due to superficial formatting cues rather than genuine linguistic differences. A logistic regression using 27 superficial features achieved macro‑F1 scores between 0.833 and 0.997, outperforming other detectors on arXiv subsets. The most powerful cue was the PDF extraction artifact—human texts preserve line breaks while generated texts appear as a single block—allowing classification at 0.996 AUC. By introducing format counterfactuals and normalizing formatting, the authors demonstrate that re‑wrapping machine‑written abstracts can flip 20–27% of detector decisions, reducing the generalization gap and improving out‑of‑domain performance.

By Anastasia Voznyuk, Andrey Grabovoy
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 5

Found but Not Read: When Extracted Text Closes the Retrieval-Reading Gap in Document Vision-Language Models

The paper investigates the gap between retrieval and reading in document vision‑language models, showing that even when the correct page is retrieved, the model often fails to use the text on that page. By comparing answers derived from page images alone versus images plus extracted OCR text, the authors demonstrate that adding OCR text can improve strict accuracy by 13 to 16 points on their FoveDoc‑Bench benchmark. The study also reveals that OCR benefits textual evidence but not charts or figures, and that its advantage diminishes as retrieval quality worsens.

By Qingtao Xia, Siyao Cheng, Jiahua Bao, Jiaxing Du, Jie Liu
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
Aug 27

Retrieve, Match, Escalate: Accurate and Scalable Product Linking with VLM-Distilled Cross-Encoders and Agentic VLMs

The paper introduces a scalable product‑linking system that uses a retrieve‑then‑match cascade. First, a lightweight text cross‑encoder auto‑resolves the majority of merchant‑catalog product pairs with high precision, while an agentic multimodal vision‑language model handles the remaining ambiguous cases by inspecting images and performing web searches. This approach balances computational cost and accuracy, improving overall link coverage from 68% to 77% without requiring fine‑tuning of the agent.

By Jian Wang, Steven Xu, Sanjyot Thete, Maryam Barouti, Tom Tang, Elaine Wu, Charu Sareen, Kyle MacDonald
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 26

Data Quality in RVL-CDIP: A Systematic Audit

The paper audits the RVL-CDIP document classification benchmark, uncovering that about 10.5% of its 400,000 documents have incorrect labels and that 35.2% of the test set contains duplicates or near-duplicates in the training set. It shows that identification codes on pages enable 69% classification accuracy, and removing them drops performance by 11 points; OCR engine choice can shift accuracy by 4.1 to 8.3 points. After correcting defects, 13 re‑trained models improve by 0.9 to 2.9 points, with LayoutLMv3 achieving 96.5% accuracy, and the authors release a cleaned corpus, annotations, and out‑of‑distribution data.

By Stefan Larson, Kevin Leach
arXiv AI
Sep 4

SHELF: A Synthetic Harness for Multi-Task Bibliographic Benchmarking

SHELF is a Python system that creates synthetic, controlled benchmark data for evaluating large language models on bibliographic tasks such as classification, clustering, retrieval, pair classification, and instruction retrieval. It generates 62,899 model-written documents based on Library of Congress vocabularies and compares methods like TF, TF‑IDF, BM25, popular encoders, and zero‑shot decoders, reporting performance metrics such as 0.8887 for subject classification and 0.2605 for genre‑form classification. The tool also allows independent variation of bibliographic facets and can produce unseen documents beyond a model’s training cutoff, with results indicating that model rankings transfer more reliably than absolute scores when compared to other benchmarks.

By Michael J. Bommarito II