  Multimodal pre-training with text, layout, and image has achieved SOTA
performance for visually-rich document understanding tasks recently, which
demonstrates the great potential for joint learning across different
modalities. In this paper, we present LayoutXLM, a multimodal pre-trained model
for multilingual document understanding, which aims to bridge the language
barriers for visually-rich document understanding. To accurately evaluate
LayoutXLM, we also introduce a multilingual form understanding benchmark
dataset named XFUN, which includes form understanding samples in 7 languages
(Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese), and
key-value pairs are manually labeled for each language. Experiment results show
that the LayoutXLM model has significantly outperformed the existing SOTA
cross-lingual pre-trained models on the XFUN dataset. The pre-trained LayoutXLM
model and the XFUN dataset will be publicly available at
https://aka.ms/layoutxlm.
