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Document Understanding is an evolving field in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In particular, visual and spatial features are essential in addition to the raw text itself and hence, several multimodal models were developed in the field of Visual Document Understanding (VDU). However, while research is mainly focused on Key Information Extraction (KIE), Relation Extraction (RE) between identified entities is still under-studied. For instance, RE is crucial to regroup entities or obtain a comprehensive hierarchy of data in a document. In this paper, we present a model that, initialized from LayoutLMv3, can match or outperform the current state-of-the-art results in RE applied to Visually-Rich Documents (VRD) on FUNSD and CORD datasets, without any specific pre-training and with fewer parameters. We also report an extensive ablation study performed on FUNSD, highlighting the great impact of certain features and modelization choices on the performances., Comment: Accepted at the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2024)

Advances in the Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU) field and particularly the Key-Information Extraction (KIE) task are marked with the emergence of efficient Transformer-based approaches such as the LayoutLM models. Despite the good performance of KIE models when fine-tuned on public benchmarks, they still struggle to generalize on complex real-life use-cases lacking sufficient document annotations. Our research highlighted that KIE standard benchmarks such as SROIE and FUNSD contain significant similarity between training and testing documents and can be adjusted to better evaluate the generalization of models. In this work, we designed experiments to quantify the information redundancy in public benchmarks, revealing a 75% template replication in SROIE official test set and 16% in FUNSD. We also proposed resampling strategies to provide benchmarks more representative of the generalization ability of models. We showed that models not suited for document analysis struggle on the adjusted splits dropping on average 10,5% F1 score on SROIE and 3.5% on FUNSD compared to multi-modal models dropping only 7,5% F1 on SROIE and 0.5% F1 on FUNSD., Comment: 15 pages, ICDAR 2023 (17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition)

Research in Document Intelligence and especially in Document Key Information Extraction (DocKIE) has been mainly solved as Token Classification problem. Recent breakthroughs in both natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision helped building document-focused pre-training methods, leveraging a multimodal understanding of the document text, layout and image modalities. However, these breakthroughs also led to the emergence of a new DocKIE subtask of extractive document Question Answering (DocQA), as part of the Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) research field. In this work, we compare the Question Answering approach with the classical token classification approach for document key information extraction. We designed experiments to benchmark five different experimental setups : raw performances, robustness to noisy environment, capacity to extract long entities, fine-tuning speed on Few-Shot Learning and finally Zero-Shot Learning. Our research showed that when dealing with clean and relatively short entities, it is still best to use token classification-based approach, while the QA approach could be a good alternative for noisy environment or long entities use-cases.

Neural conditional language generation models achieve the state-of-the-art in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) but are highly dependent on the quality of parallel training dataset. When trained on low-quality datasets, these models are prone to various error types, including hallucinations, i.e. outputs that are fluent, but unrelated to the source sentences. These errors are particularly dangerous, because on the surface the translation can be perceived as a correct output, especially if the reader does not understand the source language. We present a case study focusing on model understanding and regularisation to reduce hallucinations in NMT. We first use feature attribution methods to study the behaviour of an NMT model that produces hallucinations. We then leverage these methods to propose a novel loss function that substantially helps reduce hallucinations and does not require retraining the model from scratch.

Recently, the concept of traveling-wave NMR/MRI was introduced by Brunner et al. (Nature 457, 994-992 (2009)), who demonstrated MR images acquired using radio frequency (RF) waves propagating down the bore of an MR scanner. One of the significant limitations of this approach is that each bore has a specific cutoff frequency, which can be higher than most Larmor frequencies of at the magnetic field strengths commonly in use for MR imaging and spectroscopy today. We overcome this limitation by using a central conductor in the waveguide and thereby converting it to a transmission line (TL), which has no cutoff frequency. Broadband propagation of waves through the sample thus becomes possible. NMR spectra and images with such an arrangement are presented and genuine traveling wave behavior is demonstrated. In addition to facilitating NMR spectroscopy and imaging in smaller bores via traveling waves, this approach also allows one to perform multinuclear traveling wave experiments (an example of which is shown), and to study otherwise difficult-to-access samples in unusual geometries., Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, previously presented at (1) World-Wide NMR Conference (ISMAR/Ampere joint meeting), Florence, Italy, July 9, 2010, and (2) Experimental NMR Conference, Asilomar, CA, April 13, 2011