Abstract: Existing work on DocVQA only considers single-page documents. However, in real applications documents are mostly composed of multiple pages that should be processed altogether. In this work, we propose a new multimodal hierarchical method Hi-VT5, that overcomes the limitations of current methods to process long multipage documents. In contrast to previous hierarchical methods that focus on different semantic granularity (He et al., 2021) or different subtasks (Zhou et al., 2022) used in image classification. Our method is a hierarchical transformer architecture where the encoder learns to summarize the most relevant information of every page and then, the decoder uses this summarized representation to generate the final answer, following a bottom-up approach. Moreover, due to the lack of multipage DocVQA datasets, we also introduce MP-DocVQA, an extension of SP-DocVQA where questions are posed over multipage documents instead of single pages. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Hi-VT5 is able, in a single stage, to answer the questions and provide the page that contains the answer, which can be used as a kind of explainability measure.

Abstract: Self-supervised learning has recently emerged as a strong alternative in document analysis. These approaches are now capable of learning high-quality image representations and overcoming the limitations of supervised methods, which require a large amount of labeled data. However, these methods are unable to capture new knowledge in an incremental fashion, where data is presented to the model sequentially, which is closer to the realistic scenario. In this paper, we explore the potential of continual self-supervised learning to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem in handwritten text recognition, as an example of sequence recognition. Our method consists in adding intermediate layers called adapters for each task, and efficiently distilling knowledge from the previous model while learning the current task. Our proposed framework is efficient in both computation and memory complexity. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we evaluate our method by transferring the learned model to diverse text recognition downstream tasks, including Latin and non-Latin scripts. As far as we know, this is the first application of continual self-supervised learning for handwritten text recognition. We attain state-of-the-art performance on English, Italian and Russian scripts, whilst adding only a few parameters per task. The code and trained models will be publicly available.

Abstract: Video Question Answering methods focus on commonsense reasoning and visual cognition of objects or persons and their interactions over time. Current VideoQA approaches ignore the textual information present in the video. Instead, we argue that textual information is complementary to the action and provides essential contextualisation cues to the reasoning process. To this end, we propose a novel VideoQA task that requires reading and understanding the text in the video. To explore this direction, we focus on news videos and require QA systems to comprehend and answer questions about the topics presented by combining visual and textual cues in the video. We introduce the ``NewsVideoQA'' dataset that comprises more than 8,600 QA pairs on 3,000+ news videos obtained from diverse news channels from around the world. We demonstrate the limitations of current Scene Text VQA and VideoQA methods and propose ways to incorporate scene text information into VideoQA methods.

Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task where given an image and a natural language question, the objective is to generate a natural language answer. At the intersection between computer vision and natural language processing, this task can be seen as a measure of image understanding capabilities, as it requires to reason about objects, actions, colors, positions, the relations between the different elements as well as commonsense reasoning, world knowledge, arithmetic skills and natural language understanding. However, even though the text present in the images conveys important semantically rich information that is explicit and not available in any other form, most VQA methods remained illiterate, largely
ignoring the text despite its potential significance. In this thesis, we set out on a journey to bring reading capabilities to computer vision models applied to the VQA task, creating new datasets and methods that can read, reason and integrate the text with other visual cues in natural scene images and documents.
In Chapter 3, we address the combination of scene text with visual information to fully understand all the nuances of natural scene images. To achieve this objective, we define a new sub-task of VQA that requires reading the text in the image, and highlight the limitations of the current methods. In addition, we propose a new architecture that integrates both modalities and jointly reasons about textual and visual features. In Chapter 5, we shift the domain of VQA with reading capabilities and apply it on scanned industry document images, providing a high-level end-purpose perspective to Document Understanding, which has been
primarily focused on digitizing the document’s contents and extracting key values without considering the ultimate purpose of the extracted information. For this, we create a dataset which requires methods to reason about the unique and challenging elements of documents, such as text, images, tables, graphs and complex layouts, to provide accurate answers in natural language. However, we observed that explicit visual features provide a slight contribution in the overall performance, since the main information is usually conveyed within the text and its position. In consequence, in Chapter 6, we propose VQA on infographic images, seeking for document images with more visually rich elements that require to fully exploit visual information in order to answer the questions. We show the performance gap of
different methods when used over industry scanned and infographic images, and propose a new method that integrates the visual features in early stages, which allows the transformer architecture to exploit the visual features during the self-attention operation. Instead, in Chapter 7, we apply VQA on a big collection of single-page documents, where the methods must find which documents are relevant to answer the question, and provide the answer itself. Finally, in Chapter 8, mimicking real-world application problems where systems must process documents with multiple pages, we address the multipage document visual question answering task. We demonstrate the limitations of existing methods, including models specifically designed to process long sequences. To overcome these limitations, we propose
a hierarchical architecture that can process long documents, answer questions, and provide the index of the page where the information to answer the question is located as an explainability measure.

Abstract: The field of visual document understanding has witnessed a rapid growth in emerging challenges and powerful multi-modal strategies. However, they rely on an extensive amount of document data to learn their pretext objectives in a ``pre-train-then-fine-tune'' paradigm and thus, suffer a significant performance drop in real-world online industrial settings. One major reason is the over-reliance on OCR engines to extract local positional information within a document page. Therefore, this hinders the model's generalizability, flexibility and robustness due to the lack of capturing global information within a document image. We introduce TransferDoc, a cross-modal transformer-based architecture pre-trained in a self-supervised fashion using three novel pretext objectives. TransferDoc learns richer semantic concepts by unifying language and visual representations, which enables the production of more transferable models. Besides, two novel downstream tasks have been introduced for a ``closer-to-real'' industrial evaluation scenario where TransferDoc outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.