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Srikar Appalaraju

14 accepted papers

2026

Towards GUI Agents: Vision-Language Diffusion Models for GUI Grounding

CVPR 2026

Autoregressive (AR) vision-language models (VLMs) have long dominated multimodal understanding, reasoning, and graphical user interface (GUI) grounding. Recently, discrete diffusion vision-language models (DVLMs) have shown strong performance in multimodal reasoning, offering bidirectional attention

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

On the Analysis and Distillation of Emergent Outlier Properties in Pre-trained Language Models

NAACL 2025long

A small subset of dimensions within language Transformers’ representation spaces emerge as “outliers” during pretraining, encoding critical knowledge sparsely. We extend previous findings on emergent outliers to Encoder-Decoder Transformers and instruction-finetuned models, and tackle the problem of…

2025

R-VLM: Region-Aware Vision Language Model for Precise GUI Grounding

ACL 2025finding

Visual agent models for automating human activities on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have emerged as a promising research direction, driven by advances in large Vision Language Models (VLMs). A critical challenge in GUI automation is the precise grounding of interface elements across diverse plat…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Turbocharging Web Automation: The Impact of Compressed History States

ACL 2025finding

Language models have led to leap forward in web automation. The current web automation approaches take the current web state, history actions, and language instruction as inputs to predict the next action, overlooking the importance of history states. However, the highly verbose nature of web page s…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

DEED: Dynamic Early Exit on Decoder for Accelerating Encoder-Decoder Transformer Models

NAACL 2024findings

Encoder-decoder transformer models have achieved great success on various vision-language (VL) and language tasks, but they suffer from high inference latency. Typically, the decoder takes up most of the latency because of the auto-regressive decoding. To accelerate the inference, we propose an appr…

2024

DocFormerv2: Local Features for Document Understanding

AAAI 2024technical

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…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2024

DocKD: Knowledge Distillation from LLMs for Open-World Document Understanding Models

EMNLP 2024main

Visual document understanding (VDU) is a challenging task that involves understanding documents across various modalities (text and image) and layouts (forms, tables, etc.). This study aims to enhance generalizability of small VDU models by distilling knowledge from LLMs. We identify that directly p…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Enhancing Vision-Language Pre-training with Rich Supervisions

CVPR 2024highlight

We propose Strongly Supervised pre-training with ScreenShots (S4) - a novel pre-training paradigm for Vision-Language Models using data from large-scale web screenshot rendering. Using web screenshots unlocks a treasure trove of visual and textual cues that are not present in using image-text pairs.…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multiple-Question Multiple-Answer Text-VQA

NAACL 2024industry

We present Multiple-Question Multiple-Answer (MQMA), a novel approach to do text-VQA in encoder-decoder transformer models. To the best of our knowledge, almost all previous approaches for text-VQA process a single question and its associated content to predict a single answer. However, in industry…

2024

No Head Left Behind – Multi-Head Alignment Distillation for Transformers

AAAI 2024technical

Knowledge distillation aims at reducing model size without compromising much performance. Recent work has applied it to large vision-language (VL) Transformers, and has shown that attention maps in the multi-head attention modules of vision-language Transformers contain extensive intra-modal and cro…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

VisFocus: Prompt-Guided Vision Encoders for OCR-Free Dense Document Understanding

ECCV 2024poster

"In recent years, notable advancements have been made in the domain of visual document understanding, with the prevailing architecture comprising a cascade of vision and language models. The text component can either be extracted explicitly with the use of external OCR models in OCR-based approaches…

2023

A Multi-Modal Multilingual Benchmark for Document Image Classification

EMNLP 2023long findings

Document image classification is different from plain-text document classification and consists of classifying a document by understanding the content and structure of documents such as forms, emails, and other such documents. We show that the only existing dataset for this task (Lewis et al., 2006)…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

LaTr: Layout-Aware Transformer for Scene-Text VQA

CVPR 2022oral

We propose a novel multimodal architecture for Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA), named Layout-Aware Transformer (LaTr). The task of STVQA requires models to reason over different modalities. Thus, we first investigate the impact of each modality, and reveal the importance of the language…

Cited by 109PDFcodeScholar
2021

DocFormer: End-to-End Transformer for Document Understanding

ICCV 2021poster

We present DocFormer - a multi-modal transformer based architecture for the task of Visual Document Understanding (VDU). VDU is a challenging problem which aims to understand documents in their varied formats(forms, receipts etc.) and layouts. In addition, DocFormer is pre-trained in an unsupervised…

Cited by 342PDFScholar