Daily Papers

This paper introduces SynthDoc, a novel synthetic document generation pipeline designed to enhance Visual Document Understanding (VDU) by generating high-quality, diverse datasets that include text, images, tables, and charts. Addressing the challenges of data acquisition and the limitations of existing datasets, SynthDoc leverages publicly available corpora and advanced rendering tools to create a comprehensive and versatile dataset. Our experiments, conducted using the Donut model, demonstrate that models trained with SynthDoc's data achieve superior performance in pre-training read tasks and maintain robustness in downstream tasks, despite language inconsistencies. The release of a benchmark dataset comprising 5,000 image-text pairs not only showcases the pipeline's capabilities but also provides a valuable resource for the VDU community to advance research and development in document image recognition. This work significantly contributes to the field by offering a scalable solution to data scarcity and by validating the efficacy of end-to-end models in parsing complex, real-world documents.

Understanding document images (e.g., invoices) is a core but challenging task since it requires complex functions such as reading text and a holistic understanding of the document. Current Visual Document Understanding (VDU) methods outsource the task of reading text to off-the-shelf Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines and focus on the understanding task with the OCR outputs. Although such OCR-based approaches have shown promising performance, they suffer from 1) high computational costs for using OCR; 2) inflexibility of OCR models on languages or types of document; 3) OCR error propagation to the subsequent process. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce a novel OCR-free VDU model named Donut, which stands for Document understanding transformer. As the first step in OCR-free VDU research, we propose a simple architecture (i.e., Transformer) with a pre-training objective (i.e., cross-entropy loss). Donut is conceptually simple yet effective. Through extensive experiments and analyses, we show a simple OCR-free VDU model, Donut, achieves state-of-the-art performances on various VDU tasks in terms of both speed and accuracy. In addition, we offer a synthetic data generator that helps the model pre-training to be flexible in various languages and domains. The code, trained model and synthetic data are available at https://github.com/clovaai/donut.

Predicting the motion of other agents in a scene is highly relevant for autonomous driving, as it allows a self-driving car to anticipate. Inspired by the success of decoder-only models for language modeling, we propose DONUT, a Decoder-Only Network for Unrolling Trajectories. Unlike existing encoder-decoder forecasting models, we encode historical trajectories and predict future trajectories with a single autoregressive model. This allows the model to make iterative predictions in a consistent manner, and ensures that the model is always provided with up-to-date information, thereby enhancing performance. Furthermore, inspired by multi-token prediction for language modeling, we introduce an 'overprediction' strategy that gives the model the auxiliary task of predicting trajectories at longer temporal horizons. This allows the model to better anticipate the future and further improves performance. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our decoder-only approach outperforms the encoder-decoder baseline, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the Argoverse 2 single-agent motion forecasting benchmark.

This work introduces VERSE, a methodology for analyzing and improving Vision-Language Models applied to Visually-rich Document Understanding by exploring their visual embedding space. VERSE enables the visualization of latent representations, supporting the assessment of model feasibility. It also facilitates the identification of problematic regions and guides the generation of synthetic data to enhance performance in those clusters. We validate the methodology by training on the synthetic MERIT Dataset and evaluating on its real-world counterpart, MERIT Secret. Results show that VERSE helps uncover the visual features associated with error-prone clusters, and that retraining with samples containing these features substantially boosts F1 performance without degrading generalization. Furthermore, we demonstrate that on-premise models such as Donut and Idefics2, when optimized with VERSE, match or even surpass the performance of SaaS solutions like GPT-4 and Pixtral.

Efficient and accurate extraction of key information from 2D engineering drawings is essential for advancing digital manufacturing workflows. Such information includes geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), measures, material specifications, and textual annotations. Manual extraction is slow and labor-intensive, while generic OCR models often fail due to complex layouts, engineering symbols, and rotated text, leading to incomplete and unreliable outputs. These limitations result in incomplete and unreliable outputs. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid vision-language framework that integrates a rotation-aware object detection model (YOLOv11-obb) with a transformer-based vision-language parser. Our structured pipeline applies YOLOv11-OBB to localize annotations and extract oriented bounding box (OBB) patches, which are then parsed into structured outputs using a fine-tuned, lightweight vision-language model (VLM). We curate a dataset of 1,367 2D mechanical drawings annotated across nine key categories. YOLOv11-OBB is trained on this dataset to detect OBBs and extract annotation patches. These are parsed using two open-source VLMs: Donut and Florence-2. Both models are lightweight and well-suited for specialized industrial tasks under limited computational overhead. Following fine-tuning of both models on the curated dataset of image patches paired with structured annotation labels, a comparative experiment is conducted to evaluate parsing performance across four key metrics. Donut outperforms Florence-2, achieving 88.5% precision, 99.2% recall, and a 93.5% F1-score, with a hallucination rate of 11.5%. Finally, a case study demonstrates how the extracted structured information supports downstream manufacturing tasks such as process and tool selection, showcasing the practical utility of the proposed framework in modernizing 2D drawing interpretation.

Mathematical modeling involves representing real-world phenomena, systems, or problems using mathematical expressions and equations to analyze, understand, and predict their behavior. Given that this process typically requires experienced experts, there is an interest in exploring whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can undertake mathematical modeling to potentially decrease human labor. To evaluate of LLMs in mathematical modeling, we introduce a new benchmark, Mamo, that transcends traditional result-oriented assessments. Unlike conventional methods that primarily assess LLMs based on the accuracy of solutions to mathematical problems, our approach offers deeper insight into the modeling process itself. By focusing on the processes LLMs undertake rather than the correctness of their final solutions, Mamo pioneers a novel evaluation paradigm. This shift underscores the importance of understanding the inherent modeling capabilities of LLMs, paving the way for a more nuanced and comprehensive analysis of their problem-solving strategies. Our work marks a significant advancement in the field, suggesting a new direction for future research by emphasizing the evaluation of LLMs' modeling processes over the mere correctness of answers. This benchmark not only facilitates a better understanding of LLMs' mathematical modeling capabilities but also sets a new standard for evaluating their performance in complex problem-solving scenarios.