From Recognition to Reasoning: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs on Real-World Receipt Document Understanding

Yandi Wang, Libin Zhan, Ziwei Huang, Tiancheng Luo, Yuxuan Jiang, Wang Dong, Leilei Gan, Jun Chen


Abstract
Extracting structured information from visual documents (Visual Information Extraction, VIE) is a cornerstone of business automation. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities, existing benchmarks suffer from critical limitations in scale and realism, lack semantic granularity, and fail to cover diverse document types. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReceiptBench, a large-scale, human-annotated benchmark consisting of 10k diverse receipts, organizing information extraction into four hierarchical sub-tasks: (1) Basic Perception for raw text spotting, (2) Format Normalization for strictly following standardization instructions, (3) Semantic Reasoning for inferring implicit attributes from context, and (4) Structure Parsing for handling nested line items. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage training framework incorporating Metric-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which translates rigorous evaluation constraints into reinforcement learning signals to enhance structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields state-of-the-art performance, surpassing leading proprietary models on complex reasoning tasks. We release our datasets and code at https://github.com/wwwT0ri/ReceiptBench.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.2135
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
46007–46024
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.2135/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yandi Wang, Libin Zhan, Ziwei Huang, Tiancheng Luo, Yuxuan Jiang, Wang Dong, Leilei Gan, and Jun Chen. 2026. From Recognition to Reasoning: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs on Real-World Receipt Document Understanding. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 46007–46024, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Recognition to Reasoning: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs on Real-World Receipt Document Understanding (Wang et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.2135.pdf
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