Interleaved text-and-image generation has been an intriguing research direction, where the models are required to generate both images and text pieces in an arbitrary order. Despite the emerging advancements in interleaved generation, the progress in its evaluation still significantly lags behind. Existing evaluation benchmarks do not support arbitrarily interleaved images and text for both inputs and outputs, and they only cover a limited number of domains and use cases. Also, current works predominantly use similarity-based metrics which fall short in assessing the quality in open-ended scenarios. To this end, we introduce InterleavedBench, the first benchmark carefully curated for the evaluation of interleaved text-and-image generation. InterleavedBench features a rich array of tasks to cover diverse real-world use cases. In addition, we present InterleavedEval, a strong reference-free metric powered by GPT-4o to deliver accurate and explainable evaluation. We carefully define five essential evaluation aspects for InterleavedEval, including text quality, perceptual quality, image coherence, text-image coherence, and helpfulness, to ensure a comprehensive and fine-grained assessment. Through extensive experiments and rigorous human evaluation, we show that our benchmark and metric can effectively evaluate the existing models with a strong correlation with human judgments surpassing previous reference-based metrics. We also provide substantial findings and insights to foster future research in interleaved generation and its evaluation.

Current research in form understanding predominantly relies on large pre-trained language models, necessitating extensive data for pre-training. However, the importance of layout structure (i.e., the spatial relationship between the entity blocks in the visually rich document) to relation extraction has been overlooked. In this paper, we propose REgion-Aware Relation Extraction (\bf{RE^2}) that leverages region-level spatial structure among the entity blocks to improve their relation prediction. We design an edge-aware graph attention network to learn the interaction between entities while considering their spatial relationship defined by their region-level representations. We also introduce a constraint objective to regularize the model towards consistency with the inherent constraints of the relation extraction task. To support the research on relation extraction from visually rich documents and demonstrate the generalizability of \bf{RE^2}, we build a new benchmark dataset, DiverseForm, that covers a wide range of domains. Extensive experiments on DiverseForm and several public benchmark datasets demonstrate significant superiority and transferability of \bf{RE^2} across various domains and languages, with up to 18.88% absolute F-score gain over all high-performing baselines