ReLayout: Towards Real-World Document Understanding via Layout-enhanced Pre-training
Zhouqiang Jiang, Bowen Wang, Junhao Chen, Yuta Nakashima
Abstract
Recent approaches for visually-rich document understanding (VrDU) uses manually annotated semantic groups, where a semantic group encompasses all semantically relevant but not obviously grouped words. As OCR tools are unable to automatically identify such grouping, we argue that current VrDU approaches are unrealistic. We thus introduce a new variant of the VrDU task, real-world visually-rich document understanding (ReVrDU), that does not allow for using manually annotated semantic groups. We also propose a new method, ReLayout, compliant with the ReVrDU scenario, which learns to capture semantic grouping through arranging words and bringing the representations of words that belong to the potential same semantic group closer together. Our experimental results demonstrate the performance of existing methods is deteriorated with the ReVrDU task, while ReLayout shows superiour performance.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{jiang-etal-2025-relayout,
title = "{R}e{L}ayout: Towards Real-World Document Understanding via Layout-enhanced Pre-training",
author = "Jiang, Zhouqiang and
Wang, Bowen and
Chen, Junhao and
Nakashima, Yuta",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.255/",
pages = "3778--3793"
}