Yihao Ding

Domain-specific Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) presents significant challenges due to the complexity and sensitivity of documents in fields such as medicine, finance, and material science. Existing Large (Multimodal) Language Models (LLMs/MLLMs) achieve promising results but face limitations such as hallucinations, inadequate domain adaptation, and reliance on extensive fine-tuning datasets. This paper introduces SynDoc, a novel framework that combines discriminative and generative models to address these challenges. SynDoc employs a robust synthetic data generation workflow, using structural information extraction and domain-specific query generation to produce high-quality annotations. Through adaptive instruction tuning, SynDoc improves the discriminative model's ability to extract domain-specific knowledge. At the same time, a recursive inferencing mechanism iteratively refines the output of both models for stable and accurate predictions. This framework demonstrates scalable, efficient, and precise document understanding and bridges the gap between domain-specific adaptation and general world knowledge for document key information extraction tasks.

Document Question Answering (QA) presents a challenge in understanding visually-rich documents (VRD), particularly those dominated by lengthy textual content like research journal articles. Existing studies primarily focus on real-world documents with sparse text, while challenges persist in comprehending the hierarchical semantic relations among multiple pages to locate multimodal components. To address this gap, we propose PDF-MVQA, which is tailored for research journal articles, encompassing multiple pages and multimodal information retrieval. Unlike traditional machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks, our approach aims to retrieve entire paragraphs containing answers or visually rich document entities like tables and figures. Our contributions include the introduction of a comprehensive PDF Document VQA dataset, allowing the examination of semantically hierarchical layout structures in text-dominant documents. We also present new VRD-QA frameworks designed to grasp textual contents and relations among document layouts simultaneously, extending page-level understanding to the entire multi-page document. Through this work, we aim to enhance the capabilities of existing vision-and-language models in handling challenges posed by text-dominant documents in VRD-QA.