DocFormer: End-to-End Transformer for Document Understanding

Srikar Appalaraju, Bhavan Jasani, Bhargava Urala Kota, Yusheng Xie, R. Manmatha; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 993-1003

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)