The robustness of a model for real-world deployment is decided by how well it performs on unseen data and distinguishes between in-domain and out-of-domain samples. Visual document classifiers have shown impressive performance on in-distribution test sets. However, they tend to have a hard time correctly classifying and differentiating out-of-distribution examples. Image-based classifiers lack the text component, whereas multi-modality transformer-based models face the token serialization problem in visual documents due to their diverse layouts. They also require a lot of computing power during inference, making them impractical for many real-world applications. We propose, GVdoc, a graph-based document classification model that addresses both of these challenges. Our approach generates a document graph based on its layout, and then trains a graph neural network to learn node and graph embeddings. Through experiments, we show that our model, even with fewer parameters, outperforms state-of-the-art models on out-of-distribution data while retaining comparable performance on the in-distribution test set.

Clustering documents by type—grouping invoices with invoices and articles with articles—is a desirable first step for organizing large collections of document scans. Humans approaching this task use both the semantics of the text and the document layout to assist in grouping like documents. LayoutLM (Xu et al., 2019), a layout-aware transformer built on top of BERT with state-of-the-art performance on document-type classification, could reasonably be expected to outperform regular BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) for document-type clustering. However, we find experimentally that BERT significantly outperforms LayoutLM on this task (p <0.001). We analyze clusters to show where layout awareness is an asset and where it is a liability.