# GDI-Bench: A Benchmark for General Document Intelligence with Vision and Reasoning Decoupling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00063/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 20 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19437/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Progressive Prompts: Continual Learning for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12314/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SEED-Bench-2-Plus: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models with Text-Rich Visual Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16790/) (2024)
- [UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05126/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench-2: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17092/) (2023)
- [Vary: Scaling up the Vision Vocabulary for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06109/) (2023)
- [Focus Anywhere for Fine-grained Multi-page Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14295/) (2024)
- [PP-OCRv2: Bag of Tricks for Ultra Lightweight OCR System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03144/) (2021)
- [Teamwork Is Not Always Good: An Empirical Study of Classifier Drift in Class-incremental Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16559/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04921/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Powers Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18536/) (2025)
- [OCR-MetaReasoning Benchmark: Evaluating the Meta-Reasoning Ability of MLLMs in Text-Rich Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30678/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has profoundly impacted the document domain, creating a wide array of application scenarios. This progress highlights the need for a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate these models' capabilities across various document-specific tasks. However, existing benchmarks often fail to locate specific model weaknesses or guide systematic improvements. To bridge this gap, we introduce a General Document Intelligence Benchmark (GDI-Bench), featuring 2.3k images across 9 key scenarios and 19 document-specific tasks. By decoupling visual complexity and reasoning complexity, the GDI-Bench structures graded tasks that allow performance assessment by difficulty, aiding in model weakness identification and optimization guidance. We evaluate various open-source and closed-source models on GDI-Bench, conducting decoupled analyses in the visual and reasoning domains, revealing their strengths and weaknesses. To address the diverse tasks and domains in the GDI-Bench, we propose a GDI-Model that mitigates catastrophic forgetting during the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) process through an intelligence-preserving training strategy, thereby reinforcing the inherent weaknesses of the base model. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on previous benchmarks and the GDI-Bench. Both our benchmark and models are or will be open-sourced on https://huggingface.co/GDIBench.