mPLUG-DocOwl: Modularized Multimodal Large Language Model for Document
  Understanding
Authors: name: Jiabo Ye, name: Anwen Hu, name: Haiyang Xu, name: Qinghao Ye, name: Ming Yan, name: Yuhao Dan, name: Chenlin Zhao, name: Guohai Xu, name: Chenliang Li, name: Junfeng Tian, name: Qian Qi, name: Ji Zhang, name: Fei Huang

Document understanding refers to automatically extract, analyze and
comprehend information from various types of digital documents, such as a web
page. Existing Multi-model Large Language Models (MLLMs), including mPLUG-Owl,
have demonstrated promising zero-shot capabilities in shallow OCR-free text
recognition, indicating their potential for OCR-free document understanding.
Nevertheless, without in-domain training, these models tend to ignore
fine-grained OCR features, such as sophisticated tables or large blocks of
text, which are essential for OCR-free document understanding. In this paper,
we propose mPLUG-DocOwl based on mPLUG-Owl for OCR-free document understanding.
Specifically, we first construct a instruction tuning dataset featuring a wide
range of visual-text understanding tasks. Then, we strengthen the OCR-free
document understanding ability by jointly train the model on language-only,
general vision-and-language, and document instruction tuning dataset with our
unified instruction tuning strategy. We also build an OCR-free document
instruction understanding evaluation set LLMDoc to better compare models'
capabilities on instruct compliance and document understanding. Experimental
results show that our model outperforms existing multi-modal models,
demonstrating its strong ability of document understanding. Besides, without
specific fine-tuning, mPLUG-DocOwl generalizes well on various downstream
tasks. Our code, models, training data and evaluation set are available at
https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl.