DocHop is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on integrated chart‑context reasoning within document‑style images. The benchmark presents narrative text that imposes multi‑step compositional constraints, while charts supply the data needed to answer questions grounded in semantic reference labels. It contains 2,074 examples across six task categories, generated via a stochastic logic‑first pipeline that controls reasoning depth and visual density, and shows a large performance gap between humans (over 90% accuracy) and the best models (62.83%).
By Zhuoran Yu, Le Thien Phuc Nguyen, Jaden Park, Xinyi Gu, Zexue He, Soochahn Lee, Rogerio Feris, Yong Jae Lee
arXiv:2610.20335v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Document understanding systems are typically evaluated as separate components via layout analysis, optical text recognition, reading-order prediction,...
By Yuheng Chen, Yufan Chen, Zhuojun Cai, Ruiping Liu, Junwei Zheng, Jiale Wei, Di Wen, Weijia Fan, Kunyu Peng, Jiaming Zhang, Rainer Stiefelhagen
DocPilot is an agentic framework for long visual document understanding that orchestrates evidence seeking through page-level navigation and fine-grained localization, integrating visual inspection, code-based numerical reasoning, and cross-modal reasoning. It employs curriculum-based agentic training to enable small language models to learn complex document solving, progressing from single-ability learning to adaptive orchestration. Experiments on benchmarks such as MMLongBench-Doc, DocBench, FinRAGBench-V, and MADQA show that DocPilot achieves strong gains with frontier VLM backbones, and its 4B variant competes with much larger models, demonstrating effectiveness and generalization across diverse long-document reasoning tasks.
By Zhuowen Liang, Xiaotian Lin, Yuyu Luo, Haixun Wang, Nan Tang
arXiv:2604. 13731v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-page Document Visual Question Answering requires reasoning over semantics, layouts, and visual elements in long, visually dense documents.
By Yuanlei Zheng, Pei Fu, Hang Li, Ziyang Wang, Yuyi Zhang, Wenyu Ruan, Xiaojin Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Wei Chen, Xiang Bai
Document understanding systems are typically evaluated as separate components via layout analysis, optical text recognition, reading-order prediction, and image captioning. This separation leaves scie...
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) streamlines long-document understanding by leveraging retrieval mechanisms to restrict input images to a highly curated subset. However, existing multimodal RAG pipelines primarily face two critical challenges: first, standard semantic similarity retrievers frequently fetch topically overlapping yet answer-void distractor pages that mislead downstream generation; second, rigid single-pass pipelines heavily depend on initial retrieval success, where any omission of core evidence inevitably causes cascading errors.
The ICDAR2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains introduced a new Visual Question Answering benchmark that tests reasoning over documents from eight distinct domains such as business reports, scientific papers, and engineering drawings. Twenty valid submissions from eight teams were evaluated, featuring approaches ranging from zero‑shot vision‑language models to multi‑agent ensembles and fine‑tuned multimodal systems. Results indicate that the most effective systems employ structured evidence extraction, retrieval, verification, and orchestration across multiple components rather than single‑pass prompting.
By Artemis Llabr\'es, Marc Serra Ortega, Tom\`as Ockier, Samuel Ortega Cuadra, Amritpal Singh, Christos Georgakilas, Andrey Barsky, Ernest Valveny, Dimosthenis Karatzas
arXiv:2607. 09068v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advancements in LVLMs necessitate robust benchmarks for complex, visually grounded reasoning.
By Yang Chen, Yunwen Li, Yufan Shen, Minghao Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Bin Fu, Qunshu Lin, Zhi Yu, Botian Shi
arXiv:2607. 04625v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) streamlines long-document understanding by leveraging retrieval mechanisms to restrict input images to a highly curated subset.
By Junyu Xiong, Yonghui Wang, Rongjian Gu, Chenyu Liu, Bing Yin, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
arXiv:2604. 01280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to identify and combine fine-grained visual cues with retrieved textual evidence.
By Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
arXiv:2609.13158v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly expected to perform visual question answering (VQA) over planar media. However, existing planar...
By Yongqi Yu, Yu Zhang
CoVA‑SFT is a new large‑scale dataset comprising 51.9K samples and over 222K multimodal reasoning steps that teach models to interleave text and visual abstractions across five layout families and 17 complex tasks. It includes explicit rationale formulations, agentic renderings, and verification loops to help models build and maintain internal visual workspaces for purely textual reasoning problems. A companion benchmark, CoVA‑Bench, contains 1,700 held‑out test samples for reproducible evaluation, and models fine‑tuned on CoVA‑SFT outperform all interleaved CoT baselines by more than 2× on average, though they still lag behind strong text‑only CoT baselines.
By Tsung-Han Wu, Heekyung Lee, Anya Ji, Haoming Chen, Trevor Darrell, Joseph E. Gonzalez, David M. Chan