# LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08387 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/

## Key facts

- Cited by 485 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [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)
- [PixelCNN++: Improving the PixelCNN with Discretized Logistic Mixture Likelihood and Other Modifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05517/) (2017)
- [LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14740/) (2020)
- [PubLayNet: largest dataset ever for document layout analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07836/) (2019)
- [FUNSD: A Dataset for Form Understanding in Noisy Scanned Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13538/) (2019)
- [XCiT: Cross-Covariance Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09681/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training End-to-End Vision-and-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02387/) (2021)
- [DocFormer: End-to-End Transformer for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11539/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 485)

- [Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03347/) (2022)
- [MinerU: An Open-Source Solution for Precise Document Content Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18839/) (2024)
- [Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13418/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12895/) (2024)
- [ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01449/) (2024)
- [MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01523/) (2024)
- [TextMonkey: An OCR-Free Large Multimodal Model for Understanding Document](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04473/) (2024)
- [mPLUG-DocOwl: Modularized Multimodal Large Language Model for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02499/) (2023)
- [UniChart: A Universal Vision-language Pretrained Model for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14761/) (2023)
- [OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07626/) (2024)
- [UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05126/) (2023)
- [Unifying Vision, Text, and Layout for Universal Document Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02623/) (2022)
- [Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08455/) (2023)
- [MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09662/) (2022)
- [DocLLM: A layout-aware generative language model for multimodal document understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00908/) (2023)
- [MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22186/) (2025)
- [M3DocRAG: Multi-modal Retrieval is What You Need for Multi-page Multi-document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04952/) (2024)
- [DocPedia: Unleashing the Power of Large Multimodal Model in the Frequency Domain for Versatile Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11810/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical multimodal transformers for Multi-Page DocVQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05935/) (2022)
- [ScreenAI: A Vision-Language Model for UI and Infographics Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04615/) (2024)
- [KOSMOS-2.5: A Multimodal Literate Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11419/) (2023)
- [LayoutLLM: Layout Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05225/) (2024)
- [MonkeyOCR: Document Parsing with a Structure-Recognition-Relation Triplet Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05218/) (2025)
- [MoVA: Adapting Mixture of Vision Experts to Multimodal Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13046/) (2024)
- [DocLayout-YOLO: Enhancing Document Layout Analysis through Diverse Synthetic Data and Global-to-Local Adaptive Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12628/) (2024)
- [Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14059/) (2025)
- [OmniParser: A Unified Framework for Text Spotting, Key Information Extraction and Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19128/) (2024)
- [LongDocURL: a Comprehensive Multimodal Long Document Benchmark Integrating Understanding, Reasoning, and Locating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18424/) (2024)
- [MAP-Neo: Highly Capable and Transparent Bilingual Large Language Model Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19327/) (2024)
- [A Survey on (M)LLM-Based GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13865/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised pre-training techniques have achieved remarkable progress in Document AI. Most multimodal pre-trained models use a masked language modeling objective to learn bidirectional representations on the text modality, but they differ in pre-training objectives for the image modality. This discrepancy adds difficulty to multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we propose LayoutLMv3 to pre-train multimodal Transformers for Document AI with unified text and image masking. Additionally, LayoutLMv3 is pre-trained with a word-patch alignment objective to learn cross-modal alignment by predicting whether the corresponding image patch of a text word is masked. The simple unified architecture and training objectives make LayoutLMv3 a general-purpose pre-trained model for both text-centric and image-centric Document AI tasks. Experimental results show that LayoutLMv3 achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in text-centric tasks, including form understanding, receipt understanding, and document visual question answering, but also in image-centric tasks such as document image classification and document layout analysis. The code and models are publicly available at urlhttps://aka.ms/layoutlmv3.