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.

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• llms
• computer-vision
• fine-tuning
• multimodal
• benchmarks