# Unifying Vision, Text, and Layout for Universal Document Processing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.02623 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02623/

## Key facts

- Cited by 140 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [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)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [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)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13318/) (2019)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [InfographicVQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12756/) (2021)
- [TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02164/) (2019)
- [Unified-IO: A Unified Model for Vision, Language, and Multi-Modal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08916/) (2022)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14740/) (2020)
- [OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15664/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [DocFormer: End-to-End Transformer for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11539/) (2021)
- [Evaluation of Deep Convolutional Nets for Document Image Classification and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.07058/) (2015)
- [DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01038/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 140)

- [PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18565/) (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)
- [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)
- [Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11854/) (2023)
- [UniChart: A Universal Vision-language Pretrained Model for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14761/) (2023)
- [UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05126/) (2023)
- [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)
- [DocPedia: Unleashing the Power of Large Multimodal Model in the Frequency Domain for Versatile Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11810/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DocILE Benchmark for Document Information Localization and Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05658/) (2023)
- [A Bounding Box is Worth One Token: Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01976/) (2024)
- [Harmonizing Visual Text Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16364/) (2024)
- [SmolDocling: An ultra-compact vision-language model for end-to-end multi-modal document conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11576/) (2025)
- [DocFormerv2: Local Features for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01733/) (2023)
- [HRVDA: High-Resolution Visual Document Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06918/) (2024)
- [DocGenome: An Open Large-scale Scientific Document Benchmark for Training and Testing Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11633/) (2024)
- [DocKylin: A Large Multimodal Model for Visual Document Understanding with Efficient Visual Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19101/) (2024)
- [DocRes: A Generalist Model Toward Unifying Document Image Restoration Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04408/) (2024)
- [SV-RAG: LoRA-Contextualizing Adaptation of MLLMs for Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01106/) (2024)
- [LayoutLLM: Large Language Model Instruction Tuning for Visually Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14252/) (2024)
- [GRAM: Global Reasoning for Multi-Page VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03411/) (2024)
- [DocLayLLM: An Efficient Multi-modal Extension of Large Language Models for Text-rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15045/) (2024)
- [OmniParser V2: Structured-Points-of-Thought for Unified Visual Text Parsing and Its Generality to Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16161/) (2025)
- [Dolphin-v2: Universal Document Parsing via Scalable Anchor Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05384/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using innovative self-supervised objectives and diverse labeled data. UDOP also learns to generate document images from text and layout modalities via masked image reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in the field of document AI that one model simultaneously achieves high-quality neural document editing and content customization. Our method sets the state-of-the-art on 8 Document AI tasks, e.g., document understanding and QA, across diverse data domains like finance reports, academic papers, and websites. UDOP ranks first on the leaderboard of the Document Understanding Benchmark.