DocFormer: End-to-End Transformer for Document Understanding
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We present DocFormer - a multi-modal transformer based architecture for the task of Visual Document Understanding (VDU). VDU is a challenging problem which aims to understand documents in their varied formats (forms, receipts etc.) and layouts. In addition, DocFormer is pre-trained in an unsupervised fashion using carefully designed tasks which encourage multi-modal interaction. DocFormer uses text, vision and spatial features and combines them using a novel multi-modal self-attention layer. DocFormer also shares learned spatial embeddings across modalities which makes it easy for the model to correlate text to visual tokens and vice versa. DocFormer is evaluated on 4 different datasets each with strong baselines. DocFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on all of them, sometimes beating models 4x its size (in no. of parameters).
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Li, Y., El Habib Daho, M., Conze, P.-H., Zeghlache, R., Le Boité, H., Tadayoni, R., Cochener, B., Lamard, M., & Quellec, G. (2024) · Computers in Biology and Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.108635 · Cited by 274 · see citing works
Shanivendra, A. C. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2603.14170
- Authors
- Appalaraju, S., Jasani, B., Kota, B. U., Xie, Y., & Manmatha, R.
- Affiliations
- Amazon (United States) (US)
- Venue
- 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2021-10
- Pages
- 973-983
- OpenAlex
- W3176664887
- Cited by
- 363
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 70 · 2025: 85 · 2024: 86 · 2023: 86 · 2022: 34 · 2021: 2
- FWCI
- 16.67
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Locations
- IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Handwritten Text Recognition Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
- Keywords
- visual document understanding, multimodal transformer, unsupervised pre-training, spatial embedding, document layout analysis, end-to-end learning
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