On Efficient Language and Vision Assistants for Visually-Situated Natural Language Understanding: What Matters in Reading and Reasoning

Recent advancements in language and vision assistants have showcased impressive capabilities but suffer from a lack of transparency, limiting broader research and reproducibility. While open-source models handle general image tasks effectively, they face challenges with the high computational demands of complex visually-situated text understanding. Such tasks often require increased token inputs and large vision modules to harness high-resolution information. Striking a balance between model size and data importance remains an open question. This study aims to redefine the design of vision-language models by identifying key components and creating efficient models with constrained inference costs. By strategically formulating datasets, optimizing vision modules, and enhancing supervision techniques, we achieve significant improvements in inference throughput while maintaining high performance. Extensive experiments across models ranging from 160M to 13B parameters offer insights into model optimization. We will fully open-source our codebase, models, and datasets at https://github.com/naver-ai/elva .

CREPE: Coordinate-Aware End-to-End Document Parser

In this study, we formulate an OCR-free sequence generation model for visual document understanding (VDU). Our model not only parses text from document images but also extracts the spatial coordinates of the text based on the multi-head architecture. Named as Coordinate-aware End-to-end Document Parser (CREPE), our method uniquely integrates these capabilities by introducing a special token for OCR text, and token-triggered coordinate decoding. We also proposed a weakly-supervised framework for cost-efficient training, requiring only parsing annotations without high-cost coordinate annotations. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate CREPE's state-of-the-art performances on document parsing tasks. Beyond that, CREPE's adaptability is further highlighted by its successful usage in other document understanding tasks such as layout analysis, document visual question answering, and so one. CREPE's abilities including OCR and semantic parsing not only mitigate error propagation issues in existing OCR-dependent methods, it also significantly enhance the functionality of sequence generation models, ushering in a new era for document understanding studies.

HyperCLOVA X Technical Report

We introduce HyperCLOVA X, a family of large language models (LLMs) tailored to the Korean language and culture, along with competitive capabilities in English, math, and coding. HyperCLOVA X was trained on a balanced mix of Korean, English, and code data, followed by instruction-tuning with high-quality human-annotated datasets while abiding by strict safety guidelines reflecting our commitment to responsible AI. The model is evaluated across various benchmarks, including comprehensive reasoning, knowledge, commonsense, factuality, coding, math, chatting, instruction-following, and harmlessness, in both Korean and English. HyperCLOVA X exhibits strong reasoning capabilities in Korean backed by a deep understanding of the language and cultural nuances. Further analysis of the inherent bilingual nature and its extension to multilingualism highlights the model's cross-lingual proficiency and strong generalization ability to untargeted languages, including machine translation between several language pairs and cross-lingual inference tasks. We believe that HyperCLOVA X can provide helpful guidance for regions or countries in developing their sovereign LLMs.

Prometheus-Vision: Vision-Language Model as a Judge for Fine-Grained Evaluation

Assessing long-form responses generated by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is challenging. It not only requires checking whether the VLM follows the given instruction but also verifying whether the text output is properly grounded on the given image. Inspired by the recent approach of evaluating LMs with LMs, in this work, we propose to evaluate VLMs with VLMs. For this purpose, we present a new feedback dataset called the Perception Collection, encompassing 15K customized score rubrics that users might care about during assessment. Using the Perception Collection, we train Prometheus-Vision, the first open-source VLM evaluator model that can understand the user-defined score criteria during evaluation. Prometheus-Vision shows the highest Pearson correlation with human evaluators and GPT-4V among open-source models, showing its effectiveness for transparent and accessible evaluation of VLMs. We open-source our code, dataset, and model at https://github.com/kaistAI/prometheus-vision

SCOB: Universal Text Understanding via Character-wise Supervised Contrastive Learning with Online Text Rendering for Bridging Domain Gap

Inspired by the great success of language model (LM)-based pre-training, recent studies in visual document understanding have explored LM-based pre-training methods for modeling text within document images. Among them, pre-training that reads all text from an image has shown promise, but often exhibits instability and even fails when applied to broader domains, such as those involving both visual documents and scene text images. This is a substantial limitation for real-world scenarios, where the processing of text image inputs in diverse domains is essential. In this paper, we investigate effective pre-training tasks in the broader domains and also propose a novel pre-training method called SCOB that leverages character-wise supervised contrastive learning with online text rendering to effectively pre-train document and scene text domains by bridging the domain gap. Moreover, SCOB enables weakly supervised learning, significantly reducing annotation costs. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that SCOB generally improves vanilla pre-training methods and achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods. Our findings suggest that SCOB can be served generally and effectively for read-type pre-training methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/naver-ai/scob.

Cream: Visually-Situated Natural Language Understanding with Contrastive Reading Model and Frozen Large Language Models

Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have inspired a surge of research exploring their expansion into the visual domain. While recent models exhibit promise in generating abstract captions for images and conducting natural conversations, their performance on text-rich images leaves room for improvement. In this paper, we propose the Contrastive Reading Model (Cream), a novel neural architecture designed to enhance the language-image understanding capability of LLMs by capturing intricate details typically overlooked by existing methods. Cream integrates vision and auxiliary encoders, complemented by a contrastive feature alignment technique, resulting in a more effective understanding of textual information within document images. Our approach, thus, seeks to bridge the gap between vision and language understanding, paving the way for more sophisticated Document Intelligence Assistants. Rigorous evaluations across diverse tasks, such as visual question answering on document images, demonstrate the efficacy of Cream as a state-of-the-art model in the field of visual document understanding. We provide our codebase and newly-generated datasets at https://github.com/naver-ai/cream

Technical Report on Web-based Visual Corpus Construction for Visual Document Understanding

We present a dataset generator engine named Web-based Visual Corpus Builder (Webvicob). Webvicob can readily construct a large-scale visual corpus (i.e., images with text annotations) from a raw Wikipedia HTML dump. In this report, we validate that Webvicob-generated data can cover a wide range of context and knowledge and helps practitioners to build a powerful Visual Document Understanding (VDU) backbone. The proposed engine is publicly available at https://github.com/clovaai/webvicob.

Semi-Structured Query Grounding for Document-Oriented Databases with Deep Retrieval and Its Application to Receipt and POI Matching

Semi-structured query systems for document-oriented databases have many real applications. One particular application that we are interested in is matching each financial receipt image with its corresponding place of interest (POI, e.g., restaurant) in the nationwide database. The problem is especially challenging in the real production environment where many similar or incomplete entries exist in the database and queries are noisy (e.g., errors in optical character recognition). In this work, we aim to address practical challenges when using embedding-based retrieval for the query grounding problem in semi-structured data. Leveraging recent advancements in deep language encoding for retrieval, we conduct extensive experiments to find the most effective combination of modules for the embedding and retrieval of both query and database entries without any manually engineered component. The proposed model significantly outperforms the conventional manual pattern-based model while requiring much less development and maintenance cost. We also discuss some core observations in our experiments, which could be helpful for practitioners working on a similar problem in other domains.

Donut: Document Understanding Transformer without OCR

Understanding document images (e.g., invoices) has been an important research topic and has many applications in document processing automation. Through the latest advances in deep learning-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR), current Visual Document Understanding (VDU) systems have come to be designed based on OCR. Although such OCR-based approach promise reasonable performance, they suffer from critical problems induced by the OCR, e.g., (1) expensive computational costs and (2) performance degradation due to the OCR error propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel VDU model that is end-to-end trainable without underpinning OCR framework. To this end, we propose a new task and a synthetic document image generator to pre-train the model to mitigate the dependencies on large-scale real document images. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various document understanding tasks in public benchmark datasets and private industrial service datasets. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model especially with consideration for a real-world application.

Revisiting Additive Compositionality: AND, OR and NOT Operations with Word Embeddings

It is well-known that typical word embedding methods such as Word2Vec and GloVe have the property that the meaning can be composed by adding up the embeddings (additive compositionality). Several theories have been proposed to explain additive compositionality, but the following questions remain unanswered: (Q1) The assumptions of those theories do not hold for the practical word embedding. (Q2) Ordinary additive compositionality can be seen as an AND operation of word meanings, but it is not well understood how other operations, such as OR and NOT, can be computed by the embeddings. We address these issues by the idea of frequency-weighted centering at its core. This paper proposes a post-processing method for bridging the gap between practical word embedding and the assumption of theory about additive compositionality as an answer to (Q1). It also gives a method for taking OR or NOT of the meaning by linear operation of word embedding as an answer to (Q2). Moreover, we confirm experimentally that the accuracy of AND operation, i.e., the ordinary additive compositionality, can be improved by our post-processing method (3.5x improvement in top-100 accuracy) and that OR and NOT operations can be performed correctly.