Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled LLM-based agents to directly interact with application user interfaces (UIs), enhancing agents’ performance in complex tasks. However, these agents often suffer from high latency and low reliability due to the extensive sequential UI interactions. To address this issue, we propose AXIS, a novel LLM-based agents framework that prioritize actions through application programming interfaces (APIs) over UI actions. This framework also facilitates the creation and expansion of APIs through automated exploration of applications. Our experiments on Microsoft Word demonstrate that AXIS reduces task completion time by 65%-70% and cognitive workload by 38%-53%, while maintaining accuracy of 97%-98% compared to humans. Our work contributes to a new human-agent-computer interaction (HACI) framework and explores a fresh UI design principle for application providers to turn applications into agents in the era of LLMs, paving the way towards an agent-centric operating system (Agent OS). The code and dataset will be available at https://aka.ms/haci_axis.

Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) aims to translate text within document images, facing generalization challenges due to limited training data and the complex interplay between visual and textual information. To address these challenges, we introduce M4Doc, a novel single-to-mix Modality alignment framework leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). M4Doc aligns an imageonly encoder with the multimodal representations of an MLLM, pre-trained on large-scale document image datasets. This alignment enables a lightweight DIMT model to learn crucial visual-textual correlations during training. During inference, M4Doc bypasses the MLLM, maintaining computational efficiency while benefiting from its multimodal knowledge. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in translation quality, especially in cross-domain generalization and challenging document image scenarios. The code will be released upon acceptance.

An important trend in the realm of large language models (LLMs) is the development of longer context windows. However, training LLMs with long context windows to acquire the capability of effectively modeling lengthy inputs is often hindered by the scarcity of naturally long-context data. Existing methods for constructing long-context data by concatenating short documents have overlooked a crucial characteristic of long-context data quality, namely semantic dependency. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Retrieval, Dependency Recognition, and Reorder for data synthesis (Re³Syn), which leverages semantic similarity to retrieve relevant documents and form several batches. Within each batch, the framework comprehensively recognizes dependency and utilizes them, along with a reorder algorithm, to organize the short documents into coherent long-context data. Comprehensive experiment on multiple benchmarks indicate that the data generated by the Re³Syn has longer dependencies and significantly enhances the model’s long-context capabilities. For reproducibility, we will release our codebase upon acceptance.

Document Image Translation (DIT) aims to translate documents in images from one language to another. It requires visual layouts and textual contents understanding, as well as document coherence capturing. However, current methods often rely on the quality of OCR output, which, particularly in complex-layout scenarios, frequently loses the crucial document coherence, leading to chaotic text. To overcome this problem, we introduce a novel end-to-end network, named Zoom-out DIT (ZoomDIT), inspired by human translation procedures. It jointly accomplishes the multi-level tasks including word positioning, sentence recognition & translation, and document organization, based on a fine-to-coarse zoom-out framework, to progressively realize “chaotic words to coherent document” and improve translation. We further contribute a new large-scale DIT dataset with multi-level fine-grained labels. Extensive experiments on public and our new dataset demonstrate significant improvements in translation quality towards complex-layout document images, offering a robust solution for reorganizing the chaotic OCR outputs to a coherent document translation.

Document Image Translation (DIT), which aims at translating documents in images from source language to the target, plays an important role in Document Intelligence. It requires a comprehensive understanding of document multi-modalities and a focused concentration on relevant textual regions during translation. However, most existing methods usually rely on the vanilla encoder-decoder paradigm, severely losing concentration on key regions that are especially crucial for complex-layout document translation. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose a new Query-Response DIT framework (QRDIT). QRDIT reformulates the DIT task into a parallel response/translation process of the multiple queries (i.e., relevant source texts), explicitly centralizing its focus toward the most relevant textual regions to ensure translation accuracy. A novel dynamic aggregation mechanism is also designed to enhance the text semantics in query features toward translation. Extensive experiments in four translation directions on three benchmarks demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance, showing significant translation quality improvements toward whole-page complex-layout document images.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in document image tasks, especially Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, they struggle with Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT), which requires handling both cross-modal and cross-lingual challenges. Previous efforts to enhance DIMT capability through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on the DIMT dataset often result in the forgetting of the model’s existing monolingual abilities, such as OCR. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel fine-tuning paradigm, named Synchronously Self-Reviewing (SSR) its OCR proficiency, inspired by the concept “Bilingual Cognitive Advantage”. Specifically, SSR prompts the model to generate OCR text before producing translation text, which allows the model to leverage its strong monolingual OCR ability while learning to translate text across languages. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the proposed SSR learning helps mitigate catastrophic forgetting, improving the generalization ability of MLLMs on both OCR and DIMT tasks. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encounter difficulties when addressing complex questions like multi-hop queries.While iterative retrieval methods improve performance by gathering additional information, current approaches often rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs).In this paper, we introduce EfficientRAG, an efficient retriever for multi-hop question answering.EfficientRAG iteratively generates new queries without the need for LLM calls at each iteration and filters out irrelevant information.Experimental results demonstrate that EfficientRAG surpasses existing RAG methods on three open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets.The code is available in [aka.ms/efficientrag](https://github.com/NIL-zhuang/EfficientRAG-official).

Text image machine translation (TIMT) aims at translating source language texts in images into another target language, which has been proven successful by bridging text image recognition encoder and text translation decoder. However, it is still an open question of how to incorporate fine-grained knowledge supervision to make it consistent between recognition and translation modules. In this paper, we propose a novel TIMT method named as BabyNet, which is optimized with hierarchical parental supervision to improve translation performance. Inspired by genetic recombination and variation in the field of genetics, the proposed BabyNet is inherited from the recognition and translation parent models with a variation module of which parameters can be updated when training on the TIMT task. Meanwhile, hierarchical and multi-granularity supervision from parent models is introduced to bridge the gap between inherited modules in BabyNet. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world TIMT tests show that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods. Further analyses of various parent model combinations show the good generalization of our method.

Text image machine translation (TIMT) is a task that translates source texts embedded in the image to target translations. The existing TIMT task mainly focuses on text-line-level images. In this paper, we extend the current TIMT task and propose a novel task, **D**ocument **I**mage **M**achine **T**ranslation to **Markdown** (**DIMT2Markdown**), which aims to translate a source document image with long context and complex layout structure to markdown-formatted target translation.We also introduce a novel framework, **D**ocument **I**mage **M**achine **T**ranslation with **D**ynamic multi-pre-trained models **A**ssembling (**DIMTDA**).A dynamic model assembler is used to integrate multiple pre-trained models to enhance the model’s understanding of layout and translation capabilities.Moreover, we build a novel large-scale **Do**cument image machine **T**ranslation dataset of **A**rXiv articles in markdown format (**DoTA**), containing 126K image-translation pairs.Extensive experiments demonstrate the feasibility of end-to-end translation of rich-text document images and the effectiveness of DIMTDA.

Document image translation (DIT) aims to translate text embedded in images from one language to another. It is a challenging task that needs to understand visual layout with text semantics simultaneously. However, existing methods struggle to capture the crucial visual layout in real-world complex document images. In this work, we make the first attempt to incorporate layout knowledge into DIT in an end-to-end way. Specifically, we propose a novel Layout-aware end-to-end Document Image Translation (LayoutDIT) with multi-step conductive decoder. A layout-aware encoder is first introduced to model visual layout relations with raw OCR results. Then a novel multi-step conductive decoder is unified with hidden states conduction across three step-decoders to achieve the document translation step by step. Benefiting from the layout-aware end-to-end joint training, our LayoutDIT outperforms state-of-the-art methods with better parameter efficiency. Besides, we create a new multi-domain document image translation dataset to validate the model’s generalization. Extensive experiments show that LayoutDIT has a good generalization in diverse and complex layout scenes.

Ad hoc dataset retrieval has become an important way of finding data on the Web, where the underlying problem is how to measure the relevance of a dataset to a query. State-of-the-art solutions for this task are still lexical methods, which cannot capture semantic similarity. Semantics-aware knowledge-enhanced retrieval methods, which achieved promising results on other tasks, have yet to be systematically studied on this specialized task. To fill the gap, in this paper, we present an empirical investigation of the task where we implement and evaluate, on two test collections, a set of implicit and explicit knowledge-enhancement retrieval methods in various settings. Our results reveal the unique features of the task and suggest an interpolation of different kinds of methods as the current best practice.