Michał Pietruszka, Michał Turski, Łukasz Borchmann, Tomasz Dwojak, Gabriela Nowakowska, Karolina Szyndler, Dawid Jurkiewicz, Łukasz Garncarek. Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

We call on the Document AI (DocAI) community to reevaluate current methodologies and embrace the challenge of creating more practically-oriented benchmarks. Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE) seeks to remediate the halted research progress in understanding visually-rich documents (VRDs). We present a new dataset1with novelties related to types of questions, answers, and document layouts based on multi-industry, multi-domain, and multi-page VRDs of various origins, and dates. Moreover, we are pushing the boundaries of current methods by creating multi-task and multi-domain evaluation setups that more accurately simulate real-world situations where powerful generalization and adaptation under low-resource settings are desired. DUDE aims to set a new standard as a more practical, long-standing benchmark for the community, and we hope that it will lead to future extensions and contributions that address real-world challenges. Finally, our work illustrates the importance of finding more efficient ways to model language, images, and layout in DocAI.

We propose a novel method to sparsify attention in the Transformer model by learning to select the most-informative token representations during the training process, thus focusing on the task-specific parts of an input.A reduction of quadratic time and memory complexity to sublinear was achieved due to a robust trainable top-k operator.Our experiments on a challenging long document summarization task show that even our simple baseline performs comparably to the current SOTA, and with trainable pooling we can retain its top quality, while being 1.8× faster during training, 4.5× faster during inference and up to 13× more computationally efficient in the decoder. 1

We propose a differentiable successive halving method of relaxing the top-k operator, rendering gradient-based optimization possible. The need to perform softmax iteratively on the entire vector of scores is avoided using a tournament-style selection. As a result, a much better approximation of top-k and lower computational cost is achieved compared to the previous approach.

This paper investigates various Transformer architectures on the WikiReading Information Extraction and Machine Reading Comprehension dataset. The proposed dual-source model outperforms the current state-of-the-art by a large margin. Next, we introduce WikiReading Recycled - a newly developed public dataset, and the task of multiple-property extraction. It uses the same data as WikiReading but does not inherit its predecessor’s identified disadvantages. In addition, we provide a human-annotated test set with diagnostic subsets for a detailed analysis of model performance.