Toward a Machine Bertin: Why Visualization Needs Design Principles for Machine Cognition

Visualization's design knowledge-effectiveness rankings, encoding guidelines, color models, preattentive processing rules -- derives from six decades of psychophysical studies of human vision. Yet vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly consume chart images in automated analysis pipelines, and a growing body of benchmark evidence indicates that this human-centered knowledge base does not straightforwardly transfer to machine audiences. Machines exhibit different encoding performance patterns, process images through patch-based tokenization rather than holistic perception, and fail on design patterns that pose no difficulty for humans-while occasionally succeeding where humans struggle. Current approaches address this gap primarily by bypassing vision entirely, converting charts to data tables or structured text. We argue that this response forecloses a more fundamental question: what visual representations would actually serve machine cognition well? This paper makes the case that the visualization field needs to investigate machine-oriented visual design as a distinct research problem. We synthesize evidence from VLM benchmarks, visual reasoning research, and visualization literacy studies to show that the human-machine perceptual divergence is qualitative, not merely quantitative, and critically examine the prevailing bypassing approach. We propose a conceptual distinction between human-oriented and machine-oriented visualization-not as an engineering architecture but as a recognition that different audiences may require fundamentally different design foundations-and outline a research agenda for developing the empirical foundations the field currently lacks: the beginnings of a "machine Bertin" to complement the human-centered knowledge the field already possesses.

Youtu-Parsing: Perception, Structuring and Recognition via High-Parallelism Decoding

This paper presents Youtu-Parsing, an efficient and versatile document parsing model designed for high-performance content extraction. The architecture employs a native Vision Transformer (ViT) featuring a dynamic-resolution visual encoder to extract shared document features, coupled with a prompt-guided Youtu-LLM-2B language model for layout analysis and region-prompted decoding. Leveraging this decoupled and feature-reusable framework, we introduce a high-parallelism decoding strategy comprising two core components: token parallelism and query parallelism. The token parallelism strategy concurrently generates up to 64 candidate tokens per inference step, which are subsequently validated through a verification mechanism. This approach yields a 5--11x speedup over traditional autoregressive decoding and is particularly well-suited for highly structured scenarios, such as table recognition. To further exploit the advantages of region-prompted decoding, the query parallelism strategy enables simultaneous content prediction for multiple bounding boxes (up to five), providing an additional 2x acceleration while maintaining output quality equivalent to standard decoding. Youtu-Parsing encompasses a diverse range of document elements, including text, formulas, tables, charts, seals, and hierarchical structures. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong robustness when handling rare characters, multilingual text, and handwritten content. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Youtu-Parsing achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both the OmniDocBench and olmOCR-bench benchmarks. Overall, Youtu-Parsing demonstrates significant experimental value and practical utility for large-scale document intelligence applications.

PARL: Position-Aware Relation Learning Network for Document Layout Analysis

Document layout analysis aims to detect and categorize structural elements (e.g., titles, tables, figures) in scanned or digital documents. Popular methods often rely on high-quality Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to merge visual features with extracted text. This dependency introduces two major drawbacks: propagation of text recognition errors and substantial computational overhead, limiting the robustness and practical applicability of multimodal approaches. In contrast to the prevailing multimodal trend, we argue that effective layout analysis depends not on text-visual fusion, but on a deep understanding of documents' intrinsic visual structure. To this end, we propose PARL (Position-Aware Relation Learning Network), a novel OCR-free, vision-only framework that models layout through positional sensitivity and relational structure. Specifically, we first introduce a Bidirectional Spatial Position-Guided Deformable Attention module to embed explicit positional dependencies among layout elements directly into visual features. Second, we design a Graph Refinement Classifier (GRC) to refine predictions by modeling contextual relationships through a dynamically constructed layout graph. Extensive experiments show PARL achieves state-of-the-art results. It establishes a new benchmark for vision-only methods on DocLayNet and, notably, surpasses even strong multimodal models on M6Doc. Crucially, PARL (65M) is highly efficient, using roughly four times fewer parameters than large multimodal models (256M), demonstrating that sophisticated visual structure modeling can be both more efficient and robust than multimodal fusion.

Hierarchical Modeling Approach to Fast and Accurate Table Recognition

The extraction and use of diverse knowledge from numerous documents is a pressing challenge in intelligent information retrieval. Documents contain elements that require different recognition methods. Table recognition typically consists of three subtasks, namely table structure, cell position and cell content recognition. Recent models have achieved excellent recognition with a combination of multi-task learning, local attention, and mutual learning. However, their effectiveness has not been fully explained, and they require a long period of time for inference. This paper presents a novel multi-task model that utilizes non-causal attention to capture the entire table structure, and a parallel inference algorithm for faster cell content inference. The superiority is demonstrated both visually and statistically on two large public datasets.

RxnBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Chemical Reaction Understanding from Scientific Literature

The integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into chemistry promises to revolutionize scientific discovery, yet their ability to comprehend the dense, graphical language of reactions within authentic literature remains underexplored. Here, we introduce RxnBench, a multi-tiered benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate MLLMs on chemical reaction understanding from scientific PDFs. RxnBench comprises two tasks: Single-Figure QA (SF-QA), which tests fine-grained visual perception and mechanistic reasoning using 1,525 questions derived from 305 curated reaction schemes, and Full-Document QA (FD-QA), which challenges models to synthesize information from 108 articles, requiring cross-modal integration of text, schemes, and tables. Our evaluation of MLLMs reveals a critical capability gap: while models excel at extracting explicit text, they struggle with deep chemical logic and precise structural recognition. Notably, models with inference-time reasoning significantly outperform standard architectures, yet none achieve 50\% accuracy on FD-QA. These findings underscore the urgent need for domain-specific visual encoders and stronger reasoning engines to advance autonomous AI chemists.

PubTables-v2: A new large-scale dataset for full-page and multi-page table extraction

Table extraction (TE) is a key challenge in visual document understanding. Traditional approaches detect tables first, then recognize their structure. Recently, interest has surged in developing methods, such as vision-language models (VLMs), that can extract tables directly in their full page or document context. However, progress has been difficult to demonstrate due to a lack of annotated data. To address this, we create a new large-scale dataset, PubTables-v2. PubTables-v2 supports a number of current challenging table extraction tasks. Notably, it is the first large-scale benchmark for multi-page table structure recognition. We demonstrate its usefulness by evaluating domain-specialized VLMs on these tasks and highlighting current progress. Finally, we use PubTables-v2 to create the Page-Object Table Transformer (POTATR), an image-to-graph extension of the Table Transformer to comprehensive page-level TE. Data, code, and trained models will be released.

MonkeyOCR v1.5 Technical Report: Unlocking Robust Document Parsing for Complex Patterns

Document parsing is a core task in document intelligence, supporting applications such as information extraction, retrieval-augmented generation, and automated document analysis. However, real-world documents often feature complex layouts with multi-level tables, embedded images or formulas, and cross-page structures, which remain challenging for existing OCR systems. We introduce MonkeyOCR v1.5, a unified vision-language framework that enhances both layout understanding and content recognition through a two-stage pipeline. The first stage employs a large multimodal model to jointly predict layout and reading order, leveraging visual information to ensure sequential consistency. The second stage performs localized recognition of text, formulas, and tables within detected regions, maintaining high visual fidelity while reducing error propagation. To address complex table structures, we propose a visual consistency-based reinforcement learning scheme that evaluates recognition quality via render-and-compare alignment, improving structural accuracy without manual annotations. Additionally, two specialized modules, Image-Decoupled Table Parsing and Type-Guided Table Merging, are introduced to enable reliable parsing of tables containing embedded images and reconstruction of tables crossing pages or columns. Comprehensive experiments on OmniDocBench v1.5 demonstrate that MonkeyOCR v1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming PPOCR-VL and MinerU 2.5 while showing exceptional robustness in visually complex document scenarios. A trial link can be found at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/MonkeyOCR .

Extracting Information from Scientific Literature via Visual Table Question Answering Models

This study explores three approaches to processing table data in scientific papers to enhance extractive question answering and develop a software tool for the systematic review process. The methods evaluated include: (1) Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for extracting information from documents, (2) Pre-trained models for document visual question answering, and (3) Table detection and structure recognition to extract and merge key information from tables with textual content to answer extractive questions. In exploratory experiments, we augmented ten sample test documents containing tables and relevant content against RF- EMF-related scientific papers with seven predefined extractive question-answer pairs. The results indicate that approaches preserving table structure outperform the others, particularly in representing and organizing table content. Accurately recognizing specific notations and symbols within the documents emerged as a critical factor for improved results. Our study concludes that preserving the structural integrity of tables is essential for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of extractive question answering in scientific documents.

MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing

We introduce MinerU2.5, a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy while maintaining exceptional computational efficiency. Our approach employs a coarse-to-fine, two-stage parsing strategy that decouples global layout analysis from local content recognition. In the first stage, the model performs efficient layout analysis on downsampled images to identify structural elements, circumventing the computational overhead of processing high-resolution inputs. In the second stage, guided by the global layout, it performs targeted content recognition on native-resolution crops extracted from the original image, preserving fine-grained details in dense text, complex formulas, and tables. To support this strategy, we developed a comprehensive data engine that generates diverse, large-scale training corpora for both pretraining and fine-tuning. Ultimately, MinerU2.5 demonstrates strong document parsing ability, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, surpassing both general-purpose and domain-specific models across various recognition tasks, while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead.

TABLET: Table Structure Recognition using Encoder-only Transformers

To address the challenges of table structure recognition, we propose a novel Split-Merge-based top-down model optimized for large, densely populated tables. Our approach formulates row and column splitting as sequence labeling tasks, utilizing dual Transformer encoders to capture feature interactions. The merging process is framed as a grid cell classification task, leveraging an additional Transformer encoder to ensure accurate and coherent merging. By eliminating unstable bounding box predictions, our method reduces resolution loss and computational complexity, achieving high accuracy while maintaining fast processing speed. Extensive experiments on FinTabNet and PubTabNet demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing approaches, particularly in real-world applications. Our method offers a robust, scalable, and efficient solution for large-scale table recognition, making it well-suited for industrial deployment.