# Transformers and Language Models in Form Understanding: A Comprehensive Review of Scanned Document Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04080 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04080/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [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)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13318/) (2019)
- [VLMo: Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training with Mixture-of-Modality-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02358/) (2021)
- [LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14740/) (2020)
- [Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05208/) (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)
- [Scene Text Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13648/) (2019)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [ICDAR2019 Competition on Scanned Receipt OCR and Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10213/) (2021)
- [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)
- [UniLMv2: Pseudo-Masked Language Models for Unified Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12804/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [TextHawk: Exploring Efficient Fine-Grained Perception of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09204/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models for Text-rich Image Understanding: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16586/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning based Key Information Extraction from Business Documents: Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06345/) (2024)
- [Document Intelligence in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13366/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Masked Faces: Recognition, Detection, and Unmasking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05900/) (2024)
- [AiBAT: Artificial Intelligence/Instructions for Build, Assembly, and Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02955/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of research works on the topic of form understanding in the context of scanned documents. We delve into recent advancements and breakthroughs in the field, highlighting the significance of language models and transformers in solving this challenging task. Our research methodology involves an in-depth analysis of popular documents and forms of understanding of trends over the last decade, enabling us to offer valuable insights into the evolution of this domain. Focusing on cutting-edge models, we showcase how transformers have propelled the field forward, revolutionizing form-understanding techniques. Our exploration includes an extensive examination of state-of-the-art language models designed to effectively tackle the complexities of noisy scanned documents. Furthermore, we present an overview of the latest and most relevant datasets, which serve as essential benchmarks for evaluating the performance of selected models. By comparing and contrasting the capabilities of these models, we aim to provide researchers and practitioners with useful guidance in choosing the most suitable solutions for their specific form understanding tasks.