KnowVrDU: A Unified Knowledge-aware Prompt-Tuning Framework for Visually-rich Document Understanding

Yunqi Zhang, Yubo Chen, Jingzhe Zhu, Jinyu Xu, Shuai Yang, Zhaoliang Wu, Liang Huang, Yongfeng Huang, Shuai Chen


Abstract
In Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU), recent advances of incorporating layout and image features into the pre-training language models have achieved significant progress. Existing methods usually developed complicated dedicated architectures based on pre-trained models and fine-tuned them with costly high-quality data to eliminate the inconsistency of knowledge distribution between the pre-training task and specialized downstream tasks. However, due to their huge data demands, these methods are not suitable for few-shot settings, which are essential for quick applications with limited resources but few previous works are presented. To solve these problems, we propose a unified Knowledge-aware prompt-tuning framework for Visual-rich Document Understanding (KnowVrDU) to enable broad utilization for diverse concrete applications and reduce data requirements. To model heterogeneous VrDU structures without designing task-specific architectures, we propose to reformulate various VrDU tasks into a single question-answering format with task-specific prompts and train the pre-trained model with the parameter-efficient prompt tuning method. To bridge the knowledge gap between the pre-training task and specialized VrDU tasks without additional annotations, we propose a prompt knowledge integration mechanism to leverage external open-source knowledge bases. We conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets in few-shot settings and the results validate the effectiveness of our method.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.863
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
9878–9889
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.863
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yunqi Zhang, Yubo Chen, Jingzhe Zhu, Jinyu Xu, Shuai Yang, Zhaoliang Wu, Liang Huang, Yongfeng Huang, and Shuai Chen. 2024. KnowVrDU: A Unified Knowledge-aware Prompt-Tuning Framework for Visually-rich Document Understanding. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 9878–9889, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
KnowVrDU: A Unified Knowledge-aware Prompt-Tuning Framework for Visually-rich Document Understanding (Zhang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.863.pdf