# DocReader: Bounding-Box Free Training of a Document Information Extraction Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04313/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Cyclical Learning Rates for Training Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01186/) (2015)
- [LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13318/) (2019)
- [Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01360/) (2016)
- [Evaluation of Deep Convolutional Nets for Document Image Classification and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.07058/) (2015)
- [Modeling Coverage for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.04811/) (2016)
- [Chargrid: Towards Understanding 2D Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08799/) (2018)
- [Graph Convolution for Multimodal Information Extraction from Visually Rich Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11279/) (2019)
- [BERTgrid: Contextualized Embedding for 2D Document Representation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04948/) (2019)
- [TRIE: End-to-End Text Reading and Information Extraction for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13118/) (2020)
- [Kleister: A novel task for Information Extraction involving Long Documents with Complex Layout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02356/) (2020)
- [Attention-based Extraction of Structured Information from Street View Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03549/) (2017)
- [SEE: Towards Semi-Supervised End-to-End Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05404/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15664/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Document Recognition and Understanding with Dessurt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16618/) (2022)
- [DocParser: End-to-end OCR-free Information Extraction from Visually Rich Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12484/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning based Key Information Extraction from Business Documents: Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06345/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Information extraction from documents is a ubiquitous first step in many business applications. During this step, the entries of various fields must first be read from the images of scanned documents before being further processed and inserted into the corresponding databases. While many different methods have been developed over the past years in order to automate the above extraction step, they all share the requirement of bounding-box or text segment annotations of their training documents. In this work we present DocReader, an end-to-end neural-network-based information extraction solution which can be trained using solely the images and the target values that need to be read. The DocReader can thus leverage existing historical extraction data, completely eliminating the need for any additional annotations beyond what is naturally available in existing human-operated service centres. We demonstrate that the DocReader can reach and surpass other methods which require bounding-boxes for training, as well as provide a clear path for continual learning during its deployment in production.