# Beyond Human Annotation: Recent Advances in Data Generation Methods for Document Intelligence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12318 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12318/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 142 of its 201 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 142)

- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13318/) (2019)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Hallucination in Large Multi-Modal Models via Robust Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14565/) (2023)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14740/) (2020)
- [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)
- [PubLayNet: largest dataset ever for document layout analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07836/) (2019)
- [PlotQA: Reasoning over Scientific Plots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00997/) (2019)
- [FigureQA: An Annotated Figure Dataset for Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07300/) (2017)
- [LLaVAR: Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning for Text-Rich Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17107/) (2023)
- [Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13418/) (2023)
- [Image-based table recognition: data, model, and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10683/) (2019)
- [mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12895/) (2024)
- [ReCoRD: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Commonsense Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12885/) (2018)
- [Honeybee: Locality-enhanced Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06742/) (2023)
- [MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01523/) (2024)
- [General OCR Theory: Towards OCR-2.0 via a Unified End-to-end Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01704/) (2024)
- [UniChart: A Universal Vision-language Pretrained Model for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14761/) (2023)
- [DiT: Self-supervised Pre-training for Document Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02378/) (2022)
- [MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10774/) (2023)
- [OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07626/) (2024)
- [Global Table Extractor (GTE): A Framework for Joint Table Identification and Cell Structure Recognition Using Visual Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00589/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Agentic Game Development as a Verifiable Trajectory Data Engine for Scaling World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25518/) (2026)
- [UniMoMo: Expert Merging-Based MoE Acceleration for Large Recommendation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08627/) (2026)
- [Think with Structured Grounding: Perceptual Reinforcement Learning for Chart and Visual-Tabular Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22429/) (2026)
- [PolyOCR-Venus: Unified OCR Foundation Models for Text-Centric Visual Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37712/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The advancement of Document Intelligence (DI) demands large-scale, high-quality training data, yet manual annotation remains a critical bottleneck. While data generation methods are evolving rapidly, existing surveys are constrained by fragmented focuses on single modalities or specific tasks, lacking a unified perspective aligned with real-world workflows. To fill this gap, this survey establishes the first comprehensive technical map for data generation in DI. Data generation is redefined as supervisory signal production, and a novel taxonomy is introduced based on the "availability of data and labels." This framework organizes methodologies into four resource-centric paradigms: Data Augmentation, Data Generation from Scratch, Automated Data Annotation, and Self-Supervised Signal Construction. Furthermore, a multi-level evaluation framework is established to integrate intrinsic quality and extrinsic utility, compiling performance gains across diverse DI benchmarks. Guided by this unified structure, the methodological landscape is dissected to reveal critical challenges such as fidelity gaps and frontiers including co-evolutionary ecosystems. Ultimately, by systematizing this fragmented field, data generation is positioned as the central engine for next-generation DI.