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 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 AI
Oct 9

From Pixels to Structure: Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Document OCR and Structured JSON Extraction

The paper evaluates eight open‑source lightweight Vision‑Language Models (up to 7 B parameters) for converting document images into structured JSON, focusing on heritage collections with historical handwriting and non‑standard layouts. It compares zero‑shot, few‑shot, and fine‑tuned settings, measuring performance with CER, ANLS*, and mAP‑F1, and examines the effects of hyperparameter tuning, image preprocessing, and multi‑stage training. The study demonstrates that adapted VLMs can serve as a sustainable, private alternative to commercial OCR systems for institutional archives.

By Uddipan Basu Bir, Vincent Christlein, Andreas Maier, Mathias Zinnen
arXiv AI
Sep 28

The Right Information Extraction Pipeline Depends on the Document: Accuracy-Energy Trade-offs for Small, Local Models

The study investigates how the choice between processing page images or parsed text in an information extraction pipeline depends on the document’s layout, focusing on privacy‑sensitive, on‑premise scenarios with small models (≤8 B parameters). It evaluates accuracy and energy consumption across input representations, model families, and inference settings, finding that batching dramatically reduces energy use, FP8 quantization offers modest savings, and neural OCR is far more energy‑intensive than classical OCR. The optimal representation varies: vision‑language models excel on layout‑rich documents, while small text‑only models with a cheap parser perform best on near‑plain‑text contracts, achieving higher accuracy and lower energy than any vision‑language setup.

By Christoph Walser, Mauricio Fadel Argerich, Jonathan F\"urst