Locating Failure in Multi-Page Visually Rich Document Understanding: An Empirical Attribution

Multi-page visually-rich document understanding (MP-VRDU) requires managing evidence that is sparse, spread across pages, and often exceeds a model's context window. Prior work has produced competing, largely untested claims about how these systems should be built. We attribute incorrect answers to three failure modes, representation, selection, and reasoning, and isolate each over a multi-page document understanding dataset by intervening on one while holding the others fixed. We find that vision is necessary but does not replace text extraction, that missing pages bound accuracy while distractors cost little, and that reasoners fail to integrate evidence across pages even when it is fully supplied. Prompting can shift reasoning behaviour substantially, improving some outcomes at the expense of others. We translate these findings into guidance for building such systems under a fixed compute budget.