Perception, Layout, and Validation: Calibrated Confidence for Reliable Straight-Through Processing of Financial Documents

Yichao Jin, Yushuo Wang, Han Yuxuan, Ching Yee Sonia Kwan, Weiyang Song, Kent Chiu Jin Chun, Chong Hwee Wong, Tiong Kiat Wong, Kenneth Zhu Ke, Jingyuan Zhao


Abstract
Straight-through processing (STP) on extracted key-value fields from financial documents without human review requires a calibrated probability together with a bounded guarantee on the residual error of the auto-approved tier. The emergence of modern Vision Language Models (VLMs) provides an out-of-the-box capability for extracting the key-values, but their verbalized confidence signals are unreliable and weakly track field correctness. This paper introduces a decomposed confidence layer along three interpretable channels, including perception, layout, and validation. Together with a final conformal risk control, the score can be used for reliable STP of financial documents. The method is validated on three public datasets covering real invoices, synthetic invoices, and ad-buy forms, using two different VLM families (Qwen3.6-27B and Gemini-3.1-Flash-Lite). Our decomposed score consistently improves the separation of correct from incorrect extractions, substantially raising the AUROC from 0.54–0.74 for VLM verbalized signals to 0.90-0.99 with contributions from all three designed channels. Crucially for industrial deployment, this enables usable STP. The native VLM confidence signals could clear only 0.1%-7.0% of fields under risk control at a target error of ≤ 10%. In contrast, the proposed method auto-approves 49-72% of fields while holding the empirical error of the accepted tier at or below the target.
Anthology ID:
2026.docinsights-1.17
Volume:
The Proceedings of Workshop on Document Intelligence and Understanding
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Santosh T.Y.S.S., Amit Agarwal, Vivek Gupta, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Aparna Garimella, Yufang Hou
Venues:
DocInsights | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
232–243
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.docinsights-1.17/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yichao Jin, Yushuo Wang, Han Yuxuan, Ching Yee Sonia Kwan, Weiyang Song, Kent Chiu Jin Chun, Chong Hwee Wong, Tiong Kiat Wong, Kenneth Zhu Ke, and Jingyuan Zhao. 2026. Perception, Layout, and Validation: Calibrated Confidence for Reliable Straight-Through Processing of Financial Documents. In The Proceedings of Workshop on Document Intelligence and Understanding, pages 232–243, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Perception, Layout, and Validation: Calibrated Confidence for Reliable Straight-Through Processing of Financial Documents (Jin et al., DocInsights 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.docinsights-1.17.pdf