UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
Similar Papers
A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yihao Ding, Siwen Luo, Yue Dai, Yanbei Jiang, Zechuan Li, Qiang Sun, Geoffrey Martin, Wei Liu, Yifan Peng
| Challenge: | Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) frameworks are a key area of research . early approaches to VRDU relied on manually crafted rules and domain-specific heuristics . conventional deep learning approaches do not integrate the diverse modalities in documents . |
| Approach: | They review recent advances in MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are scalable, reliable, and adaptable, the authors argue . their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have advanced rapidly, yet most remain English-centric . scaling multilingual multimodal instruction tuning is limited by the scarcity and high cost of non-English image–text supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment by composing complementary task vectors over a shared LLM backbone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with a fully multimodally trained model using less than 2% of the text data. |
Multimodal Large Language Models for Text-rich Image Understanding: A Comprehensive Review (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Pei Fu, Tongkun Guan, Zining Wang, Zhentao Guo, Chen Duan, Hao Sun, Boming Chen, Qianyi Jiang, Jiayao Ma, Kai Zhou, Junfeng Luo
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language models have unified perception and understanding tasks within Visual Question Answering paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose to outline timeline, architecture, and pipeline of nearly all TIU MLLMs and review their performance on mainstream benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well on mainstream benchmarks and are compared with other models. |
The Revolution of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Davide Caffagni, Federico Cocchi, Luca Barsellotti, Nicholas Moratelli, Sara Sarto, Lorenzo Baraldi, Lorenzo Baraldi, Marcella Cornia, Rita Cucchiara
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to the development of multimodal large language model. |
| Approach: | They present a review of recent visual-based Large Language Models and analyze their architectures and alignment strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can integrate visual and textual modalities while providing a dialogue-based interface and instruction-following capabilities. |
mOSCAR: A Large-scale Multilingual and Multimodal Document-level Corpus (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Matthieu Futeral, Armel Randy Zebaze, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Julien Abadji, Rémi Lacroix, Cordelia Schmid, Rachel Bawden, Benoît Sagot
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multimodal large language models can learn from text-image data. |
| Approach: | They propose to train multimodal large language models on large amounts of text-image data . they also show a boost in few-shot learning performance across various multilingual tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is not public and is only in English . it is the first large-scale multilingual and multimodal document corpus crawled from the web. |
MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Run Luo, Haonan Zhang, Longze Chen, Ting-En Lin, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Min Yang, Yongbin Li, Minzheng Wang, Pengpeng Zeng, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen, Yunshui Li, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Xiaobo Xia, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | a new framework for image-text instruction data evolution improves MLLM performance . lack of high-quality instruction data remains a major bottleneck in ML modeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal instruction data evolution framework that iteratively enhances data quality through fine-grained perception, cognitive reasoning, and interaction evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves MLLM performance in nine vision-language tasks while using significantly less data. |
Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Global and Local Semantic Representations (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the ability of MLLMs to generate single tokens one by one, while lacking studies about how their representation vectors can encode global multimodal information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image-caption corpus to train Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) . they find that the topmost layers encode more global semantic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can encode more global semantic information, rather than the topmost layers, and perform better on visual-language entailment tasks. |
Visually-Situated Natural Language Understanding with Contrastive Reading Model and Frozen Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Geewook Kim, Hodong Lee, Daehee Kim, Haeji Jung, Sanghee Park, Yoonsik Kim, Sangdoo Yun, Taeho Kil, Bado Lee, Seunghyun Park
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have stimulated a surge of research aimed at extending their applications to the visual domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel neural architecture to enhance language-image understanding capability of LLMs by capturing intricate details that are often overlooked in existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better comprehension of language information in visual contexts within images. |
Advancing Vision-Language Models with Adapter Ensemble Strategies (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | CLIP revolutes vision-language pretraining by using contrastive learning on paired web data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a "adapter ensemble" with traditional machine learning techniques to augment large-scale pretrained vision-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and derives improvement when the number of ensemble parameters increases. |
Vision-Free Retrieval: Rethinking Multimodal Search with Textual Scene Descriptions (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Contrastively trained Vision-Language Models exhibit shallow language understanding, manifesting bag-of-words behaviour. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-free, single-encoder retrieval pipeline to replace traditional text-to-image retrieval paradigm with structured image descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the modality gap and improves compositionality and performance on short and long caption queries. |