# BaFCo: A Document Understanding Benchmark for Complex Bangla Form Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05614 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05614/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Document understanding and multimodal RAG, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 29 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## 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, 29 of 29)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [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)
- [mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12895/) (2024)
- [DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01038/) (2020)
- [OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07626/) (2024)
- [DocLayNet: A Large Human-Annotated Dataset for Document-Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01062/) (2022)
- [DocLLM: A layout-aware generative language model for multimodal document understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00908/) (2023)
- [LiLT: A Simple yet Effective Language-Independent Layout Transformer for Structured Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13669/) (2022)
- [BROS: A Pre-trained Language Model Focusing on Text and Layout for Better Key Information Extraction from Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04539/) (2021)
- [The rising costs of training frontier AI models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21015/) (2024)
- [Kleister: Key Information Extraction Datasets Involving Long Documents with Complex Layouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05796/) (2021)
- [DocILE Benchmark for Document Information Localization and Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05658/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Performance and Estimating the Cost of LLM Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04693/) (2024)
- [DocKylin: A Large Multimodal Model for Visual Document Understanding with Efficient Visual Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19101/) (2024)
- [LayoutLLM: Large Language Model Instruction Tuning for Visually Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14252/) (2024)
- [DocLayLLM: An Efficient Multi-modal Extension of Large Language Models for Text-rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15045/) (2024)
- [Docopilot: Improving Multimodal Models for Document-Level Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14675/) (2025)
- [Form-NLU: Dataset for the Form Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01577/) (2023)
- [BaDLAD: A Large Multi-Domain Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05325/) (2023)
- [GenKIE: Robust Generative Multimodal Document Key Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16131/) (2023)
- [BuDDIE: A Business Document Dataset for Multi-task Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04003/) (2024)
- [A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09861/) (2025)
- [GMN: Generative Multi-modal Network for Practical Document Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04713/) (2022)
- [Bhaasha, Bhasa, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia -- Current Stage and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11570/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Document comprehension is a challenging yet impactful task for Multimodal Large Language Models, especially as these systems see growing adoption in real-world, human-centric applications. However, this adoption is limited for low-resource languages such as Bangla due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated data. To address this gap, we introduce BaFCo, a benchmark dataset for Bangla form comprehension with a focus on Document Layout Analysis (DLA) and Key Information Extraction (KIE). BaFCo curates 200 multi-page complex Bangladeshi government forms, sourced from across diverse sectors including agriculture, education, banking, and land management. To accurately capture the structural and contextual complexity of these forms, we define a fine-grained annotation schema comprising 26 types of form entities, along with a separate coarse form entity set consisting of 5 types. We evaluate the latest MLLMs from the ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Qwen, and Kimi series using zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompts under both low and high reasoning setups. Our results reveal limitations in current MLLMs' ability in comprehending Bangla forms, particularly in accurately localizing highly granular form entities. Our dataset and code is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Mausul/bafco