Recently developed pre-trained text-and-layout models (PTLMs) have shown remarkable success in multiple information extraction tasks on visually-rich documents (VrDs). However, despite achieving extremely high performance on benchmarks, their real-world performance falls short of expectations. Owing to this issue, we investigate the prevailing evaluation pipeline to reveal that: (1) The inadequate annotations within benchmark datasets introduce spurious correlations between task inputs and labels, which would lead to overly-optimistic estimation of model performance. (2) The evaluation solely relies on the performance on benchmarks and is insufficient to comprehensively explore the capabilities of methods in real-world scenarios. These problems impede the prevailing evaluation pipeline from reflecting the real-world performance of methods, misleading the design choices of method optimization. In this work, we introduce EC-FUNSD, an entity-centric dataset crafted for benchmarking information extraction from visually-rich documents. This dataset contains diverse layouts and high-quality annotations. Additionally, this dataset disentangles the falsely-coupled segment and entity annotations that arises from the block-level annotation of FUNSD. Using the proposed dataset, we evaluate the real-world information extraction capabilities of PTLMs from multiple aspects, including their absolute performance, as well as generalization, robustness and fairness. The results indicate that prevalent PTLMs do not perform as well as anticipated in real-world information extraction scenarios. We hope that our study can inspire reflection on the directions of PTLM development.

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.