# FinCriticalED: A Visual Benchmark for Financial Fact-Level OCR

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14998 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14998/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chart understanding and anomaly detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 13 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Chart understanding and anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/chart-understanding-and-anomaly-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [InfographicVQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12756/) (2021)
- [OCRBench v2: An Improved Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Visual Text Localization and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00321/) (2024)
- [SEED-Bench-2-Plus: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models with Text-Rich Visual Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16790/) (2024)
- [Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08455/) (2023)
- [CC-OCR: A Comprehensive and Challenging OCR Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Literacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02210/) (2024)
- [FinMME: Benchmark Dataset for Financial Multi-Modal Reasoning Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24714/) (2025)
- [MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14028/) (2025)
- [FinAuditing: A Financial Taxonomy-Structured Multi-Document Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08886/) (2025)
- [ChartQA-X: Generating Explanations for Visual Chart Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13275/) (2025)
- [MME-Finance: A Multimodal Finance Benchmark for Expert-level Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03314/) (2024)
- [Financial Table Extraction in Image Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05260/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FinMTM: A Multi-Turn Multimodal Benchmark for Financial Reasoning and Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03130/) (2026)
- [Equal CER, Unequal Damage: Severity-Weighted Character Error Rate for OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20461/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has substantially improved document understanding, yet strong optical character recognition (OCR) performance on surface metrics does not guarantee faithful preservation of decision-critical evidence. This limitation is especially consequential in financial documents, where small visual errors can induce discrete shifts in meaning. To study this gap, we introduce FinCriticalED (Financial Critical Error Detection), a fact-centric visual benchmark for evaluating whether OCR and vision-language systems preserve financially critical evidence beyond lexical similarity. FinCriticalED contains 859 real-world financial document pages with 9,481 expert-annotated facts spanning five critical field types: numeric, temporal, monetary unit, reporting entity, and financial concept. We formulate the task as structured OCR with fact-level verification, and develop a Deterministic-Rule-Guided LLM-as-Judge protocol to assess whether model outputs preserve annotated facts in context. We benchmark 13 systems spanning OCR pipelines, specialized OCR VLMs, open-source MLLMs, and proprietary MLLMs. Results reveal a clear gap between lexical accuracy and factual reliability, with numerical values and monetary units emerging as the most vulnerable fact types, and critical errors concentrating in visually complex, mixed-layout documents with distinct failure patterns across model families. Overall, FinCriticalED provides a rigorous benchmark for trustworthy financial OCR and a practical testbed for evidence fidelity in high-stakes multimodal document understanding. Benchmark and dataset details available at https://the-finai.github.io/FinCriticalED/