Pengfei Hu

Zhenrong Zhang, Shuhang Liu, Pengfei Hu et al.

In the digital era, table structure recognition technology is a critical tool for processing and analyzing large volumes of tabular data. Previous methods primarily focus on visual aspects of table structure recovery but often fail to effectively comprehend the textual semantics within tables, particularly for descriptive textual cells. In this paper, we introduce UniTabNet, a novel framework for table structure parsing based on the image-to-text model. UniTabNet employs a ``divide-and-conquer'' strategy, utilizing an image-to-text model to decouple table cells and integrating both physical and logical decoders to reconstruct the complete table structure. We further enhance our framework with the Vision Guider, which directs the model's focus towards pertinent areas, thereby boosting prediction accuracy. Additionally, we introduce the Language Guider to refine the model's capability to understand textual semantics in table images. Evaluated on prominent table structure datasets such as PubTabNet, PubTables1M, WTW, and iFLYTAB, UniTabNet achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach. The code will also be made publicly available.

Shuhang Liu, Zhenrong Zhang, Pengfei Hu et al.

In the digital era, the ability to understand visually rich documents that integrate text, complex layouts, and imagery is critical. Traditional Key Information Extraction (KIE) methods primarily rely on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which often introduces significant latency, computational overhead, and errors. Current advanced image-to-text approaches, which bypass OCR, typically yield plain text outputs without corresponding vision grounding. In this paper, we introduce STNet (See then Tell Net), a novel end-to-end model designed to deliver precise answers with relevant vision grounding. Distinctively, STNet utilizes a unique <see> token to observe pertinent image areas, aided by a decoder that interprets physical coordinates linked to this token. Positioned at the outset of the answer text, the <see> token allows the model to first see-observing the regions of the image related to the input question-and then tell-providing articulated textual responses. To enhance the model's seeing capabilities, we collect extensive structured table recognition datasets. Leveraging the advanced text processing prowess of GPT-4, we develop the TVG (TableQA with Vision Grounding) dataset, which not only provides text-based Question Answering (QA) pairs but also incorporates precise vision grounding for these pairs. Our approach demonstrates substantial advancements in KIE performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on publicly available datasets such as CORD, SROIE, and DocVQA. The code will also be made publicly available.

Haotian Wang, Yuxuan Xi, Hang Chen et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for recognizing both discrete and dimensional emotions. In our framework, deep features extracted from foundation models are used as robust acoustic and visual representations of raw video. Three different structures based on attention-guided feature gathering (AFG) are designed for deep feature fusion. Then, we introduce a joint decoding structure for emotion classification and valence regression in the decoding stage. A multi-task loss based on uncertainty is also designed to optimize the whole process. Finally, by combining three different structures on the posterior probability level, we obtain the final predictions of discrete and dimensional emotions. When tested on the dataset of multimodal emotion recognition challenge (MER 2023), the proposed framework yields consistent improvements in both emotion classification and valence regression. Our final system achieves state-of-the-art performance and ranks third on the leaderboard on MER-MULTI sub-challenge.

Yicheng Pan, Zhenrong Zhang, Pengfei Hu et al.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in general domains and demonstrated promise in multimodal mathematical reasoning. However, applying MLLMs to geometry problem solving (GPS) remains challenging due to lack of accurate step-by-step solution data and severe hallucinations during reasoning. In this paper, we propose GeoGen, a pipeline that can automatically generates step-wise reasoning paths for geometry diagrams. By leveraging the precise symbolic reasoning, \textbf{GeoGen} produces large-scale, high-quality question-answer pairs. To further enhance the logical reasoning ability of MLLMs, we train \textbf{GeoLogic}, a Large Language Model (LLM) using synthetic data generated by GeoGen. Serving as a bridge between natural language and symbolic systems, GeoLogic enables symbolic tools to help verifying MLLM outputs, making the reasoning process more rigorous and alleviating hallucinations. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves the performance of MLLMs, achieving remarkable results on benchmarks for geometric reasoning tasks. This improvement stems from our integration of the strengths of LLMs and symbolic systems, which enables a more reliable and interpretable approach for the GPS task. Codes are available at https://github.com/ycpNotFound/GeoGen.

Jiefeng Ma, Yan Wang, Chenyu Liu et al.

Accurately identifying and organizing textual content is crucial for the automation of document processing in the field of form understanding. Existing datasets, such as FUNSD and XFUND, support entity classification and relationship prediction tasks but are typically limited to local and entity-level annotations. This limitation overlooks the hierarchically structured representation of documents, constraining comprehensive understanding of complex forms. To address this issue, we present the SRFUND, a hierarchically structured multi-task form understanding benchmark. SRFUND provides refined annotations on top of the original FUNSD and XFUND datasets, encompassing five tasks: (1) word to text-line merging, (2) text-line to entity merging, (3) entity category classification, (4) item table localization, and (5) entity-based full-document hierarchical structure recovery. We meticulously supplemented the original dataset with missing annotations at various levels of granularity and added detailed annotations for multi-item table regions within the forms. Additionally, we introduce global hierarchical structure dependencies for entity relation prediction tasks, surpassing traditional local key-value associations. The SRFUND dataset includes eight languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, making it a powerful tool for cross-lingual form understanding. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the SRFUND dataset presents new challenges and significant opportunities in handling diverse layouts and global hierarchical structures of forms, thus providing deep insights into the field of form understanding. The original dataset and implementations of baseline methods are available at https://sprateam-ustc.github.io/SRFUND