Alekh Agarwal


2024

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Efficient End-to-End Visual Document Understanding with Rationale Distillation
Wang Zhu | Alekh Agarwal | Mandar Joshi | Robin Jia | Jesse Thomason | Kristina Toutanova
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Understanding visually situated language requires interpreting complex layouts of textual and visual elements. Pre-processing tools, such as optical character recognition (OCR), can map document image inputs to textual tokens, then large language models (LLMs) can reason over text.However, such methods have high computational and engineering complexity. Can small pretrained image-to-text models accurately understand visual documents through similar recognition and reasoning steps instead?We propose Rationale Distillation (RD), which incorporates the outputs of OCR tools, LLMs, and larger multimodal models as intermediate “rationales”, and trains a small student model to predict both rationales and answers. On three visual document understanding benchmarks representing infographics, scanned documents, and figures, our Pix2Struct (282M parameters) student model finetuned with RD outperforms the base model by 4-5% absolute accuracy with only 1% higher computational cost.