The paper introduces the Structural Semantic Unit (SSU) and the Coverage, Overlap, Trespass, and Excess (COTe) score as a new framework for evaluating Document Layout Analysis (DLA) models. Unlike traditional metrics such as IoU, F1, or mAP, which are tailored to 2D projections of 3D space, COTe focuses on the semantic structure of printed media and is decomposable to reveal specific failure modes like breaching semantic boundaries or redundant parsing. Experiments on five common DLA models across three datasets show that COTe is more informative and robust—especially under granularity mismatches—than F1, and the authors provide an SSU-labelled dataset and a Python library to facilitate adoption.
By Jonathan Bourne, Mwiza Simbeye, Ishtar Govia
DR Pixel introduces a page‑native deep research agent that uses rendered document page images as the sole unit for retrieval and reasoning, bypassing OCR. The open‑source system operates on 1.06 M pages and, without training, outperforms OCR‑based baselines on GPT‑5.4, Gemini‑3.5‑Flash, and Qwen3.6‑27B while requiring fewer tool calls. Training with counterfactual credit reweighting further boosts retrieval recall by ~15 points and accuracy by >10 points on the DRPixelBench benchmark, and brings the model within 1.8 points of an oracle on the ViDoRe‑V3 out‑of‑distribution test.
By Tiansheng Hu, Yichuan Wang, James V. Talwar, Nicholas Tomlin, Chen Zhao, Sewon Min
The paper introduces a lightweight CPU-based extension to GROBID that uses layout-guided masking to identify figure, table, and paratext regions in scientific PDFs. By routing tokens to specialized GROBID models or discarding them, the method improves structural accuracy on PMC corpora and enhances figure caption recovery. It also achieves competitive table detection and body‑text precision compared to vision‑based GPU parsers while operating entirely on CPU and costing significantly less.
By Luca Foppiano, Sana Khamassi, Vipul Gupta
The paper reports that scene text recognition models, while achieving 89–97% accuracy on standard benchmarks, perform significantly worse on rare word–trigram combinations, with a 10–18 point drop in accuracy at the rare‑word/rare‑trigram corner across multiple languages and models. Scaling the vision backbone improves overall accuracy but does not alleviate this corner‑specific deficit. The authors identify the autoregressive decoder’s lexical prior as the root cause and show that architectural changes—specifically moving from autoregressive to CTC decoding—yield the largest improvement for these rare compositions.
By Genpei Zhang
The paper introduces a controlled benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on key‑value pair extraction from documents with varying levels of OCR noise. It tests 136 configurations across five instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs, three datasets, and four text‑quality conditions, using deterministic decoding to generate 17,688 document‑level inferences. The study finds that clean‑text performance does not reliably predict real‑world robustness, model rankings can reverse under noisy conditions, and few‑shot demonstrations do not always improve accuracy, highlighting reliability risks in OCR‑to‑LLM pipelines.
By Zahra Anvari
arXiv:2607. 10400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on visual document understanding benchmarks such as DocVQA, ChartQA, and MMLongBench-Doc.
By Abhigya Verma, Khyati Mahajan, Amit Kumar Saha, Shruthan Radhakrishna, Sagar Davasam, Vikas Yadav, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba
The paper introduces Loud and Clear (LoC), a method that enhances multimodal document retrieval-augmented generation by fully utilizing visual token capacity and refining retrieved pages to highlight evidence. LoC combines higher-resolution pages with OCR of query-relevant regions, achieving significant accuracy gains over eight prior methods on multiple benchmarks. The study demonstrates that the way retrieved pages are presented to the generator is a critical bottleneck beyond retrieval itself.
By Eunchan Jo, Seounghyun Jang, Sangwoo Mo
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
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:2608. 12898v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document parsing aims to transform unstructured documents into structured and machine-readable representations.
By Peng Cai, Zhaofan Zou, Shifa Liu, Yikun Wang, Jiawei Tang, Kaicheng Yang, Meng Tong, Zhongjiang He, Hao Sun
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: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