SRFUND: A Multi-Granularity Hierarchical Structure Reconstruction Benchmark in Form Understanding

Accurately identifying and organizing textual content is crucial for the automation of document processing in the field of form understanding. Existing datasets, such as FUNSD and XFUND, support entity classification and relationship prediction tasks but are typically limited to local and entity-level annotations. This limitation overlooks the hierarchically structured representation of documents, constraining comprehensive understanding of complex forms. To address this issue, we present the SRFUND, a hierarchically structured multi-task form understanding benchmark. SRFUND provides refined annotations on top of the original FUNSD and XFUND datasets, encompassing five tasks: (1) word to text-line merging, (2) text-line to entity merging, (3) entity category classification, (4) item table localization, and (5) entity-based full-document hierarchical structure recovery. We meticulously supplemented the original dataset with missing annotations at various levels of granularity and added detailed annotations for multi-item table regions within the forms. Additionally, we introduce global hierarchical structure dependencies for entity relation prediction tasks, surpassing traditional local key-value associations. The SRFUND dataset includes eight languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, making it a powerful tool for cross-lingual form understanding. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the SRFUND dataset presents new challenges and significant opportunities in handling diverse layouts and global hierarchical structures of forms, thus providing deep insights into the field of form understanding. The original dataset and implementations of baseline methods are available at https://sprateam-ustc.github.io/SRFUND

SEMv3: A Fast and Robust Approach to Table Separation Line Detection

Table structure recognition (TSR) aims to parse the inherent structure of a table from its input image. The `"split-and-merge" paradigm is a pivotal approach to parse table structure, where the table separation line detection is crucial. However, challenges such as wireless and deformed tables make it demanding. In this paper, we adhere to the "split-and-merge" paradigm and propose SEMv3 (SEM: Split, Embed and Merge), a method that is both fast and robust for detecting table separation lines. During the split stage, we introduce a Keypoint Offset Regression (KOR) module, which effectively detects table separation lines by directly regressing the offset of each line relative to its keypoint proposals. Moreover, in the merge stage, we define a series of merge actions to efficiently describe the table structure based on table grids. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate that our proposed KOR module can detect table separation lines quickly and accurately. Furthermore, on public datasets (e.g. WTW, ICDAR-2019 cTDaR Historical and iFLYTAB), SEMv3 achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. The code is available at https://github.com/Chunchunwumu/SEMv3.

A Study of Dropout-Induced Modality Bias on Robustness to Missing Video Frames for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

Advanced Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) systems have been observed to be sensitive to missing video frames, performing even worse than single-modality models. While applying the dropout technique to the video modality enhances robustness to missing frames, it simultaneously results in a performance loss when dealing with complete data input. In this paper, we investigate this contrasting phenomenon from the perspective of modality bias and reveal that an excessive modality bias on the audio caused by dropout is the underlying reason. Moreover, we present the Modality Bias Hypothesis (MBH) to systematically describe the relationship between modality bias and robustness against missing modality in multimodal systems. Building on these findings, we propose a novel Multimodal Distribution Approximation with Knowledge Distillation (MDA-KD) framework to reduce over-reliance on the audio modality and to maintain performance and robustness simultaneously. Finally, to address an entirely missing modality, we adopt adapters to dynamically switch decision strategies. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is evaluated and validated through a series of comprehensive experiments using the MISP2021 and MISP2022 datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/dalision/ModalBiasAVSR

Bidirectional Trained Tree-Structured Decoder for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

The Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) task is a critical branch in the field of OCR. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating bidirectional context information significantly improves the performance of HMER models. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize bidirectional context information during the inference stage. Furthermore, current bidirectional training methods are primarily designed for string decoders and cannot adequately generalize to tree decoders, which offer superior generalization capabilities and structural analysis capacity. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose the Mirror-Flipped Symbol Layout Tree (MF-SLT) and Bidirectional Asynchronous Training (BAT) structure. Our method extends the bidirectional training strategy to the tree decoder, allowing for more effective training by leveraging bidirectional information. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the visual and linguistic perception of the HMER model separately and introduce the Shared Language Modeling (SLM) mechanism. Through the SLM, we enhance the model's robustness and generalization when dealing with visual ambiguity, particularly in scenarios with abundant training data. Our approach has been validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating its ability to achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CROHME 2014, 2016, and 2019 datasets, as well as the HME100K dataset. The code used in our experiments will be publicly available.

Hierarchical Audio-Visual Information Fusion with Multi-label Joint Decoding for MER 2023

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for recognizing both discrete and dimensional emotions. In our framework, deep features extracted from foundation models are used as robust acoustic and visual representations of raw video. Three different structures based on attention-guided feature gathering (AFG) are designed for deep feature fusion. Then, we introduce a joint decoding structure for emotion classification and valence regression in the decoding stage. A multi-task loss based on uncertainty is also designed to optimize the whole process. Finally, by combining three different structures on the posterior probability level, we obtain the final predictions of discrete and dimensional emotions. When tested on the dataset of multimodal emotion recognition challenge (MER 2023), the proposed framework yields consistent improvements in both emotion classification and valence regression. Our final system achieves state-of-the-art performance and ranks third on the leaderboard on MER-MULTI sub-challenge.

Count, Decode and Fetch: A New Approach to Handwritten Chinese Character Error Correction

Recently, handwritten Chinese character error correction has been greatly improved by employing encoder-decoder methods to decompose a Chinese character into an ideographic description sequence (IDS). However, existing methods implicitly capture and encode linguistic information inherent in IDS sequences, leading to a tendency to generate IDS sequences that match seen characters. This poses a challenge when dealing with an unseen misspelled character, as the decoder may generate an IDS sequence that matches a seen character instead. Therefore, we introduce Count, Decode and Fetch (CDF), a novel approach that exhibits better generalization towards unseen misspelled characters. CDF is mainly composed of three parts: the counter, the decoder, and the fetcher. In the first stage, the counter predicts the number of each radical class without the symbol-level position annotations. In the second stage, the decoder employs the counting information and generates the IDS sequence step by step. Moreover, by updating the counting information at each time step, the decoder becomes aware of the existence of each radical. With the decomposed IDS sequence, we can determine whether the given character is misspelled. If it is misspelled, the fetcher under the transductive transfer learning strategy predicts the ideal character that the user originally intended to write. We integrate our method into existing encoder-decoder models and significantly enhance their performance.

HRDoc: Dataset and Baseline Method Toward Hierarchical Reconstruction of Document Structures

The problem of document structure reconstruction refers to converting digital or scanned documents into corresponding semantic structures. Most existing works mainly focus on splitting the boundary of each element in a single document page, neglecting the reconstruction of semantic structure in multi-page documents. This paper introduces hierarchical reconstruction of document structures as a novel task suitable for NLP and CV fields. To better evaluate the system performance on the new task, we built a large-scale dataset named HRDoc, which consists of 2,500 multi-page documents with nearly 2 million semantic units. Every document in HRDoc has line-level annotations including categories and relations obtained from rule-based extractors and human annotators. Moreover, we proposed an encoder-decoder-based hierarchical document structure parsing system (DSPS) to tackle this problem. By adopting a multi-modal bidirectional encoder and a structure-aware GRU decoder with soft-mask operation, the DSPS model surpass the baseline method by a large margin. All scripts and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/jfma-USTC/HRDoc.

SEMv2: Table Separation Line Detection Based on Conditional Convolution

Table structure recognition is an indispensable element for enabling machines to comprehend tables. Its primary purpose is to identify the internal structure of a table. Nevertheless, due to the complexity and diversity of their structure and style, it is highly challenging to parse the tabular data into a structured format that machines can comprehend. In this work, we adhere to the principle of the split-and-merge based methods and propose an accurate table structure recognizer, termed SEMv2 (SEM: Split, Embed and Merge). Unlike the previous works in the ``split'' stage, we aim to address the table separation line instance-level discrimination problem and introduce a table separation line detection strategy based on conditional convolution. Specifically, we design the ``split'' in a top-down manner that detects the table separation line instance first and then dynamically predicts the table separation line mask for each instance. The final table separation line shape can be accurately obtained by processing the table separation line mask in a row-wise/column-wise manner. To comprehensively evaluate the SEMv2, we also present a more challenging dataset for table structure recognition, dubbed iFLYTAB, which encompasses multiple style tables in various scenarios such as photos, scanned documents, etc. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets (e.g. SciTSR, PubTabNet and iFLYTAB) demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach. The code and iFLYTAB dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance of this paper.

GMN: Generative Multi-modal Network for Practical Document Information Extraction

Document Information Extraction (DIE) has attracted increasing attention due to its various advanced applications in the real world. Although recent literature has already achieved competitive results, these approaches usually fail when dealing with complex documents with noisy OCR results or mutative layouts. This paper proposes Generative Multi-modal Network (GMN) for real-world scenarios to address these problems, which is a robust multi-modal generation method without predefined label categories. With the carefully designed spatial encoder and modal-aware mask module, GMN can deal with complex documents that are hard to serialized into sequential order. Moreover, GMN tolerates errors in OCR results and requires no character-level annotation, which is vital because fine-grained annotation of numerous documents is laborious and even requires annotators with specialized domain knowledge. Extensive experiments show that GMN achieves new state-of-the-art performance on several public DIE datasets and surpasses other methods by a large margin, especially in realistic scenes.

Multimodal Pre-training Based on Graph Attention Network for Document Understanding

Document intelligence as a relatively new research topic supports many business applications. Its main task is to automatically read, understand, and analyze documents. However, due to the diversity of formats (invoices, reports, forms, etc.) and layouts in documents, it is difficult to make machines understand documents. In this paper, we present the GraphDoc, a multimodal graph attention-based model for various document understanding tasks. GraphDoc is pre-trained in a multimodal framework by utilizing text, layout, and image information simultaneously. In a document, a text block relies heavily on its surrounding contexts, so we inject the graph structure into the attention mechanism to form a graph attention layer so that each input node can only attend to its neighborhoods. The input nodes of each graph attention layer are composed of textual, visual, and positional features from semantically meaningful regions in a document image. We do the multimodal feature fusion of each node by the gate fusion layer. The contextualization between each node is modeled by the graph attention layer. GraphDoc learns a generic representation from only 320k unlabeled documents via the Masked Sentence Modeling task. Extensive experimental results on the publicly available datasets show that GraphDoc achieves state-of-the-art performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.