DocSynthv2: A Practical Autoregressive Modeling for Document Generation

While the generation of document layouts has been extensively explored, comprehensive document generation encompassing both layout and content presents a more complex challenge. This paper delves into this advanced domain, proposing a novel approach called DocSynthv2 through the development of a simple yet effective autoregressive structured model. Our model, distinct in its integration of both layout and textual cues, marks a step beyond existing layout-generation approaches. By focusing on the relationship between the structural elements and the textual content within documents, we aim to generate cohesive and contextually relevant documents without any reliance on visual components. Through experimental studies on our curated benchmark for the new task, we demonstrate the ability of our model combining layout and textual information in enhancing the generation quality and relevance of documents, opening new pathways for research in document creation and automated design. Our findings emphasize the effectiveness of autoregressive models in handling complex document generation tasks.

LayeredDoc: Domain Adaptive Document Restoration with a Layer Separation Approach

The rapid evolution of intelligent document processing systems demands robust solutions that adapt to diverse domains without extensive retraining. Traditional methods often falter with variable document types, leading to poor performance. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a text-graphic layer separation approach that enhances domain adaptability in document image restoration (DIR) systems. We propose LayeredDoc, which utilizes two layers of information: the first targets coarse-grained graphic components, while the second refines machine-printed textual content. This hierarchical DIR framework dynamically adjusts to the characteristics of the input document, facilitating effective domain adaptation. We evaluated our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively using a new real-world dataset, LayeredDocDB, developed for this study. Initially trained on a synthetically generated dataset, our model demonstrates strong generalization capabilities for the DIR task, offering a promising solution for handling variability in real-world data. Our code is accessible on GitHub.

DistilDoc: Knowledge Distillation for Visually-Rich Document Applications

This work explores knowledge distillation (KD) for visually-rich document (VRD) applications such as document layout analysis (DLA) and document image classification (DIC). While VRD research is dependent on increasingly sophisticated and cumbersome models, the field has neglected to study efficiency via model compression. Here, we design a KD experimentation methodology for more lean, performant models on document understanding (DU) tasks that are integral within larger task pipelines. We carefully selected KD strategies (response-based, feature-based) for distilling knowledge to and from backbones with different architectures (ResNet, ViT, DiT) and capacities (base, small, tiny). We study what affects the teacher-student knowledge gap and find that some methods (tuned vanilla KD, MSE, SimKD with an apt projector) can consistently outperform supervised student training. Furthermore, we design downstream task setups to evaluate covariate shift and the robustness of distilled DLA models on zero-shot layout-aware document visual question answering (DocVQA). DLA-KD experiments result in a large mAP knowledge gap, which unpredictably translates to downstream robustness, accentuating the need to further explore how to efficiently obtain more semantic document layout awareness.

Fetch-A-Set: A Large-Scale OCR-Free Benchmark for Historical Document Retrieval

This paper introduces Fetch-A-Set (FAS), a comprehensive benchmark tailored for legislative historical document analysis systems, addressing the challenges of large-scale document retrieval in historical contexts. The benchmark comprises a vast repository of documents dating back to the XVII century, serving both as a training resource and an evaluation benchmark for retrieval systems. It fills a critical gap in the literature by focusing on complex extractive tasks within the domain of cultural heritage. The proposed benchmark tackles the multifaceted problem of historical document analysis, including text-to-image retrieval for queries and image-to-text topic extraction from document fragments, all while accommodating varying levels of document legibility. This benchmark aims to spur advancements in the field by providing baselines and data for the development and evaluation of robust historical document retrieval systems, particularly in scenarios characterized by wide historical spectrum.

GeoContrastNet: Contrastive Key-Value Edge Learning for Language-Agnostic Document Understanding

This paper presents GeoContrastNet, a language-agnostic framework to structured document understanding (DU) by integrating a contrastive learning objective with graph attention networks (GATs), emphasizing the significant role of geometric features. We propose a novel methodology that combines geometric edge features with visual features within an overall two-staged GAT-based framework, demonstrating promising results in both link prediction and semantic entity recognition performance. Our findings reveal that combining both geometric and visual features could match the capabilities of large DU models that rely heavily on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) features in terms of performance accuracy and efficiency. This approach underscores the critical importance of relational layout information between the named text entities in a semi-structured layout of a page. Specifically, our results highlight the model's proficiency in identifying key-value relationships within the FUNSD dataset for forms and also discovering the spatial relationships in table-structured layouts for RVLCDIP business invoices. Our code and pretrained models will be accessible on our official GitHub.

SketchGPT: Autoregressive Modeling for Sketch Generation and Recognition

We present SketchGPT, a flexible framework that employs a sequence-to-sequence autoregressive model for sketch generation, and completion, and an interpretation case study for sketch recognition. By mapping complex sketches into simplified sequences of abstract primitives, our approach significantly streamlines the input for autoregressive modeling. SketchGPT leverages the next token prediction objective strategy to understand sketch patterns, facilitating the creation and completion of drawings and also categorizing them accurately. This proposed sketch representation strategy aids in overcoming existing challenges of autoregressive modeling for continuous stroke data, enabling smoother model training and competitive performance. Our findings exhibit SketchGPT's capability to generate a diverse variety of drawings by adding both qualitative and quantitative comparisons with existing state-of-the-art, along with a comprehensive human evaluation study. The code and pretrained models will be released on our official GitHub.

SVGCraft: Beyond Single Object Text-to-SVG Synthesis with Comprehensive Canvas Layout

Generating VectorArt from text prompts is a challenging vision task, requiring diverse yet realistic depictions of the seen as well as unseen entities. However, existing research has been mostly limited to the generation of single objects, rather than comprehensive scenes comprising multiple elements. In response, this work introduces SVGCraft, a novel end-to-end framework for the creation of vector graphics depicting entire scenes from textual descriptions. Utilizing a pre-trained LLM for layout generation from text prompts, this framework introduces a technique for producing masked latents in specified bounding boxes for accurate object placement. It introduces a fusion mechanism for integrating attention maps and employs a diffusion U-Net for coherent composition, speeding up the drawing process. The resulting SVG is optimized using a pre-trained encoder and LPIPS loss with opacity modulation to maximize similarity. Additionally, this work explores the potential of primitive shapes in facilitating canvas completion in constrained environments. Through both qualitative and quantitative assessments, SVGCraft is demonstrated to surpass prior works in abstraction, recognizability, and detail, as evidenced by its performance metrics (CLIP-T: 0.4563, Cosine Similarity: 0.6342, Confusion: 0.66, Aesthetic: 6.7832). The code will be available at https://github.com/ayanban011/SVGCraft.

GraphKD: Exploring Knowledge Distillation Towards Document Object Detection with Structured Graph Creation

Object detection in documents is a key step to automate the structural elements identification process in a digital or scanned document through understanding the hierarchical structure and relationships between different elements. Large and complex models, while achieving high accuracy, can be computationally expensive and memory-intensive, making them impractical for deployment on resource constrained devices. Knowledge distillation allows us to create small and more efficient models that retain much of the performance of their larger counterparts. Here we present a graph-based knowledge distillation framework to correctly identify and localize the document objects in a document image. Here, we design a structured graph with nodes containing proposal-level features and edges representing the relationship between the different proposal regions. Also, to reduce text bias an adaptive node sampling strategy is designed to prune the weight distribution and put more weightage on non-text nodes. We encode the complete graph as a knowledge representation and transfer it from the teacher to the student through the proposed distillation loss by effectively capturing both local and global information concurrently. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches. The code will be available at: https://github.com/ayanban011/GraphKD.

Diving into the Depths of Spotting Text in Multi-Domain Noisy Scenes

When used in a real-world noisy environment, the capacity to generalize to multiple domains is essential for any autonomous scene text spotting system. However, existing state-of-the-art methods employ pretraining and fine-tuning strategies on natural scene datasets, which do not exploit the feature interaction across other complex domains. In this work, we explore and investigate the problem of domain-agnostic scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly generalize to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. In this regard, we present the community a text spotting validation benchmark called Under-Water Text (UWT) for noisy underwater scenes to establish an important case study. Moreover, we also design an efficient super-resolution based end-to-end transformer baseline called DA-TextSpotter which achieves comparable or superior performance over existing text spotting architectures for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text spotting benchmarks in terms of both accuracy and model efficiency. The dataset, code and pre-trained models will be released upon acceptance.

Harnessing the Power of Multi-Lingual Datasets for Pre-training: Towards Enhancing Text Spotting Performance

The adaptation capability to a wide range of domains is crucial for scene text spotting models when deployed to real-world conditions. However, existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches usually incorporate scene text detection and recognition simply by pretraining on natural scene text datasets, which do not directly exploit the intermediate feature representations between multiple domains. Here, we investigate the problem of domain-adaptive scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly adapt to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. Further, we investigate a transformer baseline called Swin-TESTR to focus on solving scene-text spotting for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text along with an exhaustive evaluation. The results clearly demonstrate the potential of intermediate representations to achieve significant performance on text spotting benchmarks across multiple domains (e.g. language, synth-to-real, and documents). both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.