Recently, various multimodal networks for Visually-Rich Document Understanding(VRDU) have been proposed, showing the promotion of transformers by integrating visual and layout information with the text embeddings. However, most existing approaches utilize the position embeddings to incorporate the sequence information, neglecting the noisy improper reading order obtained by OCR tools. In this paper, we propose a robust layout-aware multimodal network named XYLayoutLM to capture and leverage rich layout information from proper reading orders produced by our Augmented XY Cut. Moreover, a Dilated Conditional Position Encoding module is proposed to deal with the input sequence of variable lengths, and it additionally extracts local layout information from both textual and visual modalities while generating position embeddings. Experiment results show that our XYLayoutLM achieves competitive results on document understanding tasks.
@article{arxiv.2203.06947,
title = {XYLayoutLM: Towards Layout-Aware Multimodal Networks For Visually-Rich Document Understanding},
author = {Zhangxuan Gu and Changhua Meng and Ke Wang and Jun Lan and Weiqiang Wang and Ming Gu and Liqing Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.06947},
year = {2022}
}