Papers › DocFormerv2: Local Features for Document Understanding

DocFormerv2: Local Features for Document Understanding

2 Jun 2023arXiv:2306.01733archive 2025-07-28

Srikar Appalaraju, Peng Tang, Qi Dong, Nishant Sankaran, Yichu Zhou, R. Manmatha

We propose DocFormerv2, a multi-modal transformer for Visual Document Understanding (VDU). The VDU domain entails understanding documents (beyond mere OCR predictions) e.g., extracting information from a form, VQA for documents and other tasks. VDU is challenging as it needs a model to make sense of multiple modalities (visual, language and spatial) to make a prediction. Our approach, termed DocFormerv2 is an encoder-decoder transformer which takes as input - vision, language and spatial features. DocFormerv2 is pre-trained with unsupervised tasks employed asymmetrically i.e., two novel document tasks on encoder and one on the auto-regressive decoder. The unsupervised tasks have been carefully designed to ensure that the pre-training encourages local-feature alignment between multiple modalities. DocFormerv2 when evaluated on nine datasets shows state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines e.g. TabFact (4.3%), InfoVQA (1.4%), FUNSD (1%). Furthermore, to show generalization capabilities, on three VQA tasks involving scene-text, Doc- Formerv2 outperforms previous comparably-sized models and even does better than much larger models (such as GIT2, PaLi and Flamingo) on some tasks. Extensive ablations show that due to its pre-training, DocFormerv2 understands multiple modalities better than prior-art in VDU.

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Tasks

DecoderOptical Character Recognition (OCR)Visual Question Answering (VQA)document understanding

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Visual Question Answering (VQA) DocVQA test DocFormerv2-large ANLS 0.8784 #10 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) InfographicVQA DocFormerv2-large ANLS 48.8 #15 of 21 Archive leaderboard report

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