Papers › Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding

Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding

7 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.03347archive 2025-07-28

Kenton Lee, Mandar Joshi, Iulia Turc, Hexiang Hu, Fangyu Liu, Julian Eisenschlos, Urvashi Khandelwal, Peter Shaw, Ming-Wei Chang, Kristina Toutanova

Visually-situated language is ubiquitous -- sources range from textbooks with diagrams to web pages with images and tables, to mobile apps with buttons and forms. Perhaps due to this diversity, previous work has typically relied on domain-specific recipes with limited sharing of the underlying data, model architectures, and objectives. We present Pix2Struct, a pretrained image-to-text model for purely visual language understanding, which can be finetuned on tasks containing visually-situated language. Pix2Struct is pretrained by learning to parse masked screenshots of web pages into simplified HTML. The web, with its richness of visual elements cleanly reflected in the HTML structure, provides a large source of pretraining data well suited to the diversity of downstream tasks. Intuitively, this objective subsumes common pretraining signals such as OCR, language modeling, image captioning. In addition to the novel pretraining strategy, we introduce a variable-resolution input representation and a more flexible integration of language and vision inputs, where language prompts such as questions are rendered directly on top of the input image. For the first time, we show that a single pretrained model can achieve state-of-the-art results in six out of nine tasks across four domains: documents, illustrations, user interfaces, and natural images.

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aggregate_metrics google-research/pix2struct/pix2struct/metrics.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b4928537d2a4c2e0 · report
apply_single_inference google-research/pix2struct/pix2struct/demo_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e80ac1aa6513e2cd · report
group_target google-research/pix2struct/pix2struct/postprocessors.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 04dcc2a4874ace61 · report
multi_target google-research/pix2struct/pix2struct/postprocessors.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 07dae26b6a90c397 · report
transfer_warmup_cosine_decay_schedule google-research/pix2struct/pix2struct/transfer_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b398544f82bc9630 · report

Tasks

Chart Question AnsweringDiversityImage CaptioningImage to textLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingOptical Character Recognition (OCR)Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Chart Question Answering ChartQA Pix2Struct-large 1:1 Accuracy 58.6 #23 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Chart Question Answering ChartQA Pix2Struct-base 1:1 Accuracy 56.0 #24 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) DocVQA test Pix2Struct-large ANLS 0.766 #26 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) DocVQA test Pix2Struct-base ANLS 0.721 #28 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) InfographicVQA Pix2Struct-large ANLS 40 #18 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) InfographicVQA Pix2Struct-base ANLS 38.2 #19 of 21 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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