InSight-doc: Agentic Visual Perception for Long-Document Understanding

Kaican Li, Weiyan Xie, Lewei Yao, Jiannan Wu, Lanqing Hong, Yongxiang Huang, Nevin L. Zhang


Abstract
Long-document understanding often requires reasoning over many visually rich pages, making inference costly and prone to context rot. In this work, we propose InSight-doc, an agentic visual perception framework that treats visual resolution as an adaptive reasoning-time resource. InSight-doc starts from low resolution and selectively zooms into high-resolution regions for finer evidence, without relying on any external retriever. To train such an agent, we construct an active-perception corpus of 17.9K high-quality SFT examples with region-level zoom-in trajectories, accompanied by 19.2K hard RL examples. Through SFT+RL, InSight-doc-8B improves the baseline by 4.3–16.4 accuracy points over document VQA benchmarks. On long documents, it reduces hallucination by more than 40% and inference latency by 41%–68% while maintaining an accuracy lead. Our code, datasets, and model are released at https://github.com/m-Just/InSight-doc.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1151
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24359–24389
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1151/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kaican Li, Weiyan Xie, Lewei Yao, Jiannan Wu, Lanqing Hong, Yongxiang Huang, and Nevin L. Zhang. 2026. InSight-doc: Agentic Visual Perception for Long-Document Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 24359–24389, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
InSight-doc: Agentic Visual Perception for Long-Document Understanding (Li et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1151.pdf