DREAM: Document Reconstruction via End-to-end Autoregressive Model
This addresses the need for accurate document analysis in fields like digitization and archiving, offering a novel approach that improves over multi-stage methods by reducing error propagation and preserving layout information.
The paper tackles the problem of document reconstruction by proposing DREAM, an end-to-end autoregressive model that converts text images into document sequences, achieving state-of-the-art performance and introducing a new dataset and metric for evaluation.
Document reconstruction constitutes a significant facet of document analysis and recognition, a field that has been progressively accruing interest within the scholarly community. A multitude of these researchers employ an array of document understanding models to generate predictions on distinct subtasks, subsequently integrating their results into a holistic document reconstruction format via heuristic principles. Nevertheless, these multi-stage methodologies are hindered by the phenomenon of error propagation, resulting in suboptimal performance. Furthermore, contemporary studies utilize generative models to extract the logical sequence of plain text, tables and mathematical expressions in an end-to-end process. However, this approach is deficient in preserving the information related to element layouts, which are vital for document reconstruction. To surmount these aforementioned limitations, we in this paper present an innovative autoregressive model specifically designed for document reconstruction, referred to as Document Reconstruction via End-to-end Autoregressive Model (DREAM). DREAM transmutes the text image into a sequence of document reconstruction in a comprehensive, end-to-end process, encapsulating a broader spectrum of document element information. In addition, we establish a standardized definition of the document reconstruction task, and introduce a novel Document Similarity Metric (DSM) and DocRec1K dataset for assessing the performance of the task. Empirical results substantiate that our methodology attains unparalleled performance in the realm of document reconstruction. Furthermore, the results on a variety of subtasks, encompassing document layout analysis, text recognition, table structure recognition, formula recognition and reading order detection, indicate that our model is competitive and compatible with various tasks.