A Suite of Generative Tasks for Multi-Level Multimodal Webpage
  Understanding
Authors: name: Andrea Burns, name: Krishna Srinivasan, name: Joshua Ainslie, name: Geoff Brown, name: Bryan A. Plummer, name: Kate Saenko, name: Jianmo Ni, name: Mandy Guo

Webpages have been a rich, scalable resource for vision-language and language
only tasks. Yet only pieces of webpages are kept: image-caption pairs, long
text articles, or raw HTML, never all in one place. Webpage tasks have
resultingly received little attention and structured image-text data left
underused. To study multimodal webpage understanding, we introduce the
Wikipedia Webpage suite (WikiWeb2M) of 2M pages. We verify its utility on three
generative tasks: page description generation, section summarization, and
contextual image captioning. We design a novel attention mechanism Prefix
Global, which selects the most relevant image and text content as global tokens
to attend to the rest of the webpage for context. By using page structure to
separate such tokens, it performs better than full attention with lower
computational complexity. Experiments show that the new annotations from
WikiWeb2M improve task performance compared to data from prior work. We also
include ablations on sequence length, input features, and model size.