# DocKylin: A Large Multimodal Model for Visual Document Understanding with Efficient Visual Slimming

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19101 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19101/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Document understanding and multimodal RAG, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 77 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Document understanding and multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/document-understanding-and-multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14740/) (2020)
- [TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07624/) (2021)
- [OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15664/) (2021)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03347/) (2022)
- [Monkey: Image Resolution and Text Label Are Important Things for Large Multi-modal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06607/) (2023)
- [FUNSD: A Dataset for Form Understanding in Noisy Scanned Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13538/) (2019)
- [DVQA: Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08163/) (2018)
- [PlotQA: Reasoning over Scientific Plots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00997/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [OCRBench v2: An Improved Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Visual Text Localization and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00321/) (2024)
- [Visual Large Language Models for Generalized and Specialized Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02765/) (2025)
- [TextHawk2: A Large Vision-Language Model Excels in Bilingual OCR and Grounding with 16x Fewer Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05261/) (2024)
- [Mini-Monkey: Alleviating the Semantic Sawtooth Effect for Lightweight MLLMs via Complementary Image Pyramid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02034/) (2024)
- [Inference Optimal VLMs Need Fewer Visual Tokens and More Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03312/) (2024)
- [DocLayLLM: An Efficient Multi-modal Extension of Large Language Models for Text-rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15045/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning based Visually Rich Document Content Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01287/) (2024)
- [Marten: Visual Question Answering with Mask Generation for Multi-modal Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14140/) (2025)
- [DocPruner: A Storage-Efficient Framework for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Adaptive Patch-Level Embedding Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23883/) (2025)
- [A Token-level Text Image Foundation Model for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02304/) (2025)
- [FoPru: Focal Pruning for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14164/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models for Text-rich Image Understanding: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16586/) (2025)
- [MTabVQA: Evaluating Multi-Tabular Reasoning of Language Models in Visual Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11684/) (2025)
- [A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09861/) (2025)
- [RedundancyLens: Revealing and Exploiting Visual Token Processing Redundancy for Efficient Decoder-Only MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19036/) (2025)
- [Connector-S: A Survey of Connectors in Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11453/) (2025)
- [UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07038/) (2026)
- [DocSplit: A Comprehensive Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Approach for Document Packet Recognition and Splitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15958/) (2026)
- [Survey on Question Answering over Visually Rich Documents: Methods, Challenges, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02235/) (2025)
- [Arctic-TILT. Business Document Understanding at Sub-Billion Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04632/) (2024)
- [Boosting Document Parsing Efficiency and Performance with Coarse-to-Fine Visual Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24326/) (2026)
- [CC-OCR V2: Fine-Grained Attribution of LMM Failures in Real-World Visual Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03903/) (2026)
- [QLIP: A Dynamic Quadtree Vision Prior Enhances MLLM Performance Without Retraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23004/) (2025)
- [Index-Preserving Lightweight Token Pruning for Efficient Document Understanding in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06415/) (2025)
- [MGA-VQA: Secure and Interpretable Graph-Augmented Visual Question Answering with Memory-Guided Protection Against Unauthorized Knowledge Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17881/) (2025)
- [Q-Mask: Query-driven Causal Masks for Text Anchoring in OCR-Oriented Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00161/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Large Multimodal Models in Key Information Extraction via Scene-Aware Document Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04636/) (2026)
- [Document Image Rectification Bases on Self-Adaptive Multitask Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06038/) (2025)
- [D2Dewarp: Dual Dimensions Geometric Representation Learning Based Document Image Dewarping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08492/) (2025)
- [CROP: Integrating Topological and Spatial Structures via Cross-View Prefixes for Molecular LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06917/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face significant challenges in visual document understanding (VDU) tasks due to the high resolution, dense text, and complex layouts typical of document images. These characteristics demand a high level of detail perception ability from MLLMs. While increasing input resolution improves detail perception capability, it also leads to longer sequences of visual tokens, increasing computational costs and straining the models' ability to handle long contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce DocKylin, a document-centric MLLM that performs visual content slimming at both the pixel and token levels, thereby reducing token sequence length in VDU scenarios. We introduce an Adaptive Pixel Slimming (APS) preprocessing module to perform pixel-level slimming, increasing the proportion of informative pixels. Moreover, we propose a novel Dynamic Token Slimming (DTS) module to conduct token-level slimming, filtering essential tokens and removing others to adaptively create a more compact visual sequence. Experiments demonstrate DocKylin's promising performance across various VDU benchmarks and the effectiveness of each component.