Autoregressive models have become the de facto choice for sequence generation tasks, but standard approaches treat digits as independent tokens and apply cross-entropy loss, overlooking the coherent structure of numerical sequences. This paper introduces Numerical Token Integrity Loss(NTIL) to address this gap. NTIL operates at two levels: (1) token-level, where it extends the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) to preserve ordinal relationships between numerical values, and (2) sequence-level, where it penalizes the overall discrepancy between the predicted and actual sequences. This dual approach improves numerical prediction and integrates effectively with LLMs/MLLMs. Extensive experiments show significant performance improvements with NTIL.

Recently, many studies have demonstrated that exclusively incorporating OCR-derived text and spatial layouts with large language models (LLMs) can be highly effective for document understanding tasks. However, existing methods that integrate spatial layouts with text have limitations, such as producing overly long text sequences or failing to fully leverage the autoregressive traits of LLMs. In this work, we introduce Interleaving Layout andText in a Large Language Model (LayTextLLM) for document understanding. LayTextLLM projects each bounding box to a single embedding and interleaves it with text, efficiently avoiding long sequence issues while leveraging autoregressive traits of LLMs. LayTextLLM not only streamlines the interaction of layout and textual data but also shows enhanced performance in KIE and VQA. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations reveal significant improvements of LayTextLLM, with a 15.2% increase on KIE tasks and 10.7% on VQA tasks compared to previous SOTA OCR-based LLMs. All resources are available at URL masked for anonymous review.

Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) in its proper format not only facilitates human-machine interaction in text-centric visual environments but also serves as a de facto gold proxy to evaluate AI models in the domain of text-centric scene understanding. Nonetheless, most existing TEC-VQA benchmarks focus on high-resource languages like English and Chinese. Despite pioneering works expanding multilingual QA pairs in non-text-centric VQA datasets through translation engines, the translation-based protocol encounters a substantial “visual-textual misalignment” problem when applied to TEC-VQA. Specifically, it prioritizes the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding the visual text present in images. Moreover, it fails to address complexities related to nuanced meaning, contextual distortion, language bias, and question-type diversity. In this work, we tackle multilingual TEC-VQA by introducing MTVQA, the first benchmark featuring high-quality human expert annotations across 9 diverse languages, consisting of 6,778 question-answer pairs across 2,116 images. Further, by comprehensively evaluating numerous state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), including Qwen2.5-VL, InternVL-2.5, GPT-4o, GPT-4V, Claude3, and Gemini, on the MTVQA benchmark, it is evident that there is still a large room for performance improvement (InternVL-2.5 scoring 32.2 versus 79.7 for human performance), underscoring the value of MTVQA. By providing a dataset with nuanced multilingual annotations, MTVQA aims to set a new standard for benchmarks, fostering advancements in multilingual visual text comprehension.

Document image parsing is challenging due to its complexly intertwined elements such as text paragraphs, figures, formulas, and tables. Current approaches either assemble specialized expert models or directly generate page-level content autoregressively, facing integration overhead, efficiency bottlenecks, and layout structure degradation despite their decent performance. To address these limitations, we present Dolphin ( Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting), a novel multimodal document image parsing model following an analyze-then-parse paradigm. In the first stage, Dolphin generates a sequence of layout elements in reading order. These heterogeneous elements, serving as anchors and coupled with task-specific prompts, are fed back to Dolphin for parallel content parsing in the second stage. To train Dolphin, we construct a large-scale dataset of over 30 million samples, covering multi-granularity parsing tasks. Through comprehensive evaluations on both prevalent benchmarks and self-constructed ones, Dolphin achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse page-level and element-level settings, while ensuring superior efficiency through its lightweight architecture and parallel parsing mechanism. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/ByteDance/Dolphin

Online relevance matching is an essential task of e-commerce product search to boost the utility of search engines and ensure a smooth user experience. Previous work adopts either classical relevance matching models or Transformer-style models to address it. However, they ignore the inherent bipartite graph structures that are ubiquitous in e-commerce product search logs and are too inefficient to deploy online. In this paper, we design an efficient knowledge distillation framework for e-commerce relevance matching to integrate the respective advantages of Transformer-style models and classical relevance matching models. Especially for the core student model of the framework, we propose a novel method using k-order relevance modeling. The experimental results on large-scale real-world data (the size is 6 174 million) show that the proposed method significantly improves the prediction accuracy in terms of human relevance judgment. We deploy our method to JD.com online search platform. The A/B testing results show that our method significantly improves most business metrics under price sort mode and default sort mode.

Foodborne illness is a serious but preventable public health problem – with delays in detecting the associated outbreaks resulting in productivity loss, expensive recalls, public safety hazards, and even loss of life. While social media is a promising source for identifying unreported foodborne illnesses, there is a dearth of labeled datasets for developing effective outbreak detection models. To accelerate the development of machine learning-based models for foodborne outbreak detection, we thus present TWEET-FID (TWEET-Foodborne Illness Detection), the first publicly available annotated dataset for multiple foodborne illness incident detection tasks. TWEET-FID collected from Twitter is annotated with three facets: tweet class, entity type, and slot type, with labels produced by experts as well as by crowdsource workers. We introduce several domain tasks leveraging these three facets: text relevance classification (TRC), entity mention detection (EMD), and slot filling (SF). We describe the end-to-end methodology for dataset design, creation, and labeling for supporting model development for these tasks. A comprehensive set of results for these tasks leveraging state-of-the-art single-and multi-task deep learning methods on the TWEET-FID dataset are provided. This dataset opens opportunities for future research in foodborne outbreak detection.