English

Document Understanding, Measurement, and Manipulation Using Category Theory

Computation and Language 2025-10-27 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We apply category theory to extract multimodal document structure which leads us to develop information theoretic measures, content summarization and extension, and self-supervised improvement of large pretrained models. We first develop a mathematical representation of a document as a category of question-answer pairs. Second, we develop an orthogonalization procedure to divide the information contained in one or more documents into non-overlapping pieces. The structures extracted in the first and second steps lead us to develop methods to measure and enumerate the information contained in a document. We also build on those steps to develop new summarization techniques, as well as to develop a solution to a new problem viz. exegesis resulting in an extension of the original document. Our question-answer pair methodology enables a novel rate distortion analysis of summarization techniques. We implement our techniques using large pretrained models, and we propose a multimodal extension of our overall mathematical framework. Finally, we develop a novel self-supervised method using RLVR to improve large pretrained models using consistency constraints such as composability and closure under certain operations that stem naturally from our category theoretic framework.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.21553,
  title  = {Document Understanding, Measurement, and Manipulation Using Category Theory},
  author = {Jared Claypoole and Yunye Gong and Noson S. Yanofsky and Ajay Divakaran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.21553},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:04:07.479Z