UniVIE: A Unified Label Space Approach to Visual Information Extraction from Form-like Documents
This addresses inefficiencies in document processing for applications like data entry or automation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing VIE methods.
The paper tackles the problem of Visual Information Extraction (VIE) from form-like documents by reframing it as a relation prediction problem with a unified label space, achieving state-of-the-art results on datasets like HierForms and SIBR.
Existing methods for Visual Information Extraction (VIE) from form-like documents typically fragment the process into separate subtasks, such as key information extraction, key-value pair extraction, and choice group extraction. However, these approaches often overlook the hierarchical structure of form documents, including hierarchical key-value pairs and hierarchical choice groups. To address these limitations, we present a new perspective, reframing VIE as a relation prediction problem and unifying labels of different tasks into a single label space. This unified approach allows for the definition of various relation types and effectively tackles hierarchical relationships in form-like documents. In line with this perspective, we present UniVIE, a unified model that addresses the VIE problem comprehensively. UniVIE functions using a coarse-to-fine strategy. It initially generates tree proposals through a tree proposal network, which are subsequently refined into hierarchical trees by a relation decoder module. To enhance the relation prediction capabilities of UniVIE, we incorporate two novel tree constraints into the relation decoder: a tree attention mask and a tree level embedding. Extensive experimental evaluations on both our in-house dataset HierForms and a publicly available dataset SIBR, substantiate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, underscoring the effectiveness and potential of our unified approach in advancing the field of VIE.