UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents

Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Qian Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Junyang Lin, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Key Information Extraction (KIE) from real-world documents remains challenging due to substantial variations in layout structures, visual quality, and task-specific information requirements. Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promising potential for performing end-to-end KIE directly from document images. To enable a comprehensive and systematic evaluation across realistic and diverse application scenarios, we introduce UNIKIE-BENCH, a unified benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the KIE capabilities of LMMs. UNIKIE-BENCH consists of two complementary tracks: a constrained-category KIE track with scenario-predefined schemas that reflect practical application needs, and an open-category KIE track that extracts any key information that is explicitly present in the document. Experiments on 15 state-of-the-art LMMs reveal substantial performance degradation under diverse schema definitions, long-tail key fields, and complex layouts, along with pronounced performance disparities across different document types and scenarios. These findings underscore persistent challenges in grounding accuracy and layout-aware reasoning for LMM-based KIE. All codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/UNIKIE-BENCH.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.287
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
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ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
6331–6352
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.287/
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Cite (ACL):
Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Qian Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Junyang Lin, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, and Maosong Sun. 2026. UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6331–6352, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents (Ji et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.287.pdf
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