Jihua Kang
Author directory2026
Prefix-Adaptive Block Diffusion for Efficient Document Recognition
Mingxu Chai | Ziyu Shen | Chenyu Liu | Jihua Kang | Tao Gui | Qi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mingxu Chai | Ziyu Shen | Chenyu Liu | Jihua Kang | Tao Gui | Qi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Block Diffusion Models (BDMs) support parallel generation, flexible-length output, and KV caching, making them promising for efficient document parsing. However, existing BDMs bind denoising and cache commitment to fixed block boundaries: parallelism shrinks during intra-block denoising, while generated tokens cannot be cached until the whole block is completed. Moreover, intra-block bidirectional denoising conflicts with inter-block autoregression, creating inconsistent information flow that can challenge structure-sensitive recognition. We propose the Prefix-Adaptive Block Diffusion Model (PA-BDM), which replaces intra-block bidirectional denoising with causal denoising from prefix to suffix and treats the block size as a maximum candidate range rather than a fixed commitment unit. PA-BDM uses Confidence-gated Structural Loss (CSL) to build low-entropy prefixes before extending training to longer continuations. During inference, Progressive Prefix Commitment (PPC) then dynamically commits the longest reliable prefix into the KV cache and resets the next candidate range from the updated prefix, restoring a large parallel decoding space at each step. Experiments show that the 3B PA-BDM achieves higher recognition scores on several benchmarks and improves inference throughput by 71.6% over the 2.5B MinerU-Diffusion.
State-Conditioned Visual Evidence Retrieval for Fine-Grained Perception in Document Vision-Language Models
Mingxu Chai | Chenyu Liu | Ziyu Shen | Jiazheng Zhang | Kaidi Zhang | Jihua Kang | Tao Gui | Qi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mingxu Chai | Chenyu Liu | Ziyu Shen | Jiazheng Zhang | Kaidi Zhang | Jihua Kang | Tao Gui | Qi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Compared with typical vision–language tasks, document parsing places stronger demands on fine-grained visual perception. Existing vision–language model (VLM)–based parsing approaches rely on globally compressed visual tokens, where fine-grained details are entangled within a single representation and repeatedly accessed during decoding. However, we observe that the visual evidence for each prediction is typically localized and conditioned on the current decoding state, whereas such representations must be accessed in full at every decoding step, resulting in inefficient computation. To address this mismatch, we formulate perception as state-conditioned visual evidence retrieval (SCVER) during autoregressive decoding. The model operates on a compact global representation for coarse structure and retrieves a small set of relevant high-resolution regions conditioned on the current token state. This coarse-to-fine design enables on-demand access to fine-grained visual cues, relieving globally shared representations from encoding all fine-grained details. We further find that learning such state-conditioned retrieval in VLMs is challenging and unstable. To stabilize this process, we introduce a Spatially-Guided Learning Objective (SGLO) to guide the retrieval process. Experiments on document parsing benchmarks show that SCVER improves robustness under reduced input resolution and achieves a better accuracy–efficiency trade-off, demonstrating the effectiveness of on-demand visual evidence retrieval for fine-grained perception.
2025
DocFusion: A Unified Framework for Document Parsing Tasks
Mingxu Chai | Ziyu Shen | Chong Zhang | Yue Zhang | Xiao Wang | Shihan Dou | Jihua Kang | Jiazheng Zhang | Qi Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Mingxu Chai | Ziyu Shen | Chong Zhang | Yue Zhang | Xiao Wang | Shihan Dou | Jihua Kang | Jiazheng Zhang | Qi Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Document parsing involves layout element detection and recognition, essential for extracting information. However, existing methods often employ multiple models for these tasks, leading to increased system complexity and maintenance overhead. While some models attempt to unify detection and recognition, they often fail to address the intrinsic differences in data representations, thereby limiting performance in document processing. Our research reveals that recognition relies on discrete tokens, whereas detection relies on continuous coordinates, leading to challenges in gradient updates and optimization. To bridge this gap, we propose the Gaussian-Kernel Cross-Entropy Loss (GK-CEL), enabling generative frameworks to handle both tasks simultaneously. Building upon GK-CEL, we propose DocFusion, a unified document parsing model with only 0.28B parameters. Additionally, we construct the DocLatex-1.6M dataset to provide high-quality training support. Experimental results show that DocFusion, equipped with GK-CEL, performs competitively across four core document parsing tasks, validating the effectiveness of our unified approach.