Vincent Perot


2023

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QueryForm: A Simple Zero-shot Form Entity Query Framework
Zifeng Wang | Zizhao Zhang | Jacob Devlin | Chen-Yu Lee | Guolong Su | Hao Zhang | Jennifer Dy | Vincent Perot | Tomas Pfister
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Zero-shot transfer learning for document understanding is a crucial yet under-investigated scenario to help reduce the high cost involved in annotating document entities. We present a novel query-based framework, QueryForm, that extracts entity values from form-like documents in a zero-shot fashion. QueryForm contains a dual prompting mechanism that composes both the document schema and a specific entity type into a query, which is used to prompt a Transformer model to perform a single entity extraction task. Furthermore, we propose to leverage large-scale query-entity pairs generated from form-like webpages with weak HTML annotations to pre-train QueryForm. By unifying pre-training and fine-tuning into the same query-based framework, QueryForm enables models to learn from structured documents containing various entities and layouts, leading to better generalization to target document types without the need for target-specific training data. QueryForm sets new state-of-the-art average F1 score on both the XFUND (+4.6% 10.1%) and the Payment (+3.2% 9.5%) zero-shot benchmark, with a smaller model size and no additional image input.

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FormNetV2: Multimodal Graph Contrastive Learning for Form Document Information Extraction
Chen-Yu Lee | Chun-Liang Li | Hao Zhang | Timothy Dozat | Vincent Perot | Guolong Su | Xiang Zhang | Kihyuk Sohn | Nikolay Glushnev | Renshen Wang | Joshua Ainslie | Shangbang Long | Siyang Qin | Yasuhisa Fujii | Nan Hua | Tomas Pfister
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The recent advent of self-supervised pre-training techniques has led to a surge in the use of multimodal learning in form document understanding. However, existing approaches that extend the mask language modeling to other modalities require careful multi-task tuning, complex reconstruction target designs, or additional pre-training data. In FormNetV2, we introduce a centralized multimodal graph contrastive learning strategy to unify self-supervised pre-training for all modalities in one loss. The graph contrastive objective maximizes the agreement of multimodal representations, providing a natural interplay for all modalities without special customization. In addition, we extract image features within the bounding box that joins a pair of tokens connected by a graph edge, capturing more targeted visual cues without loading a sophisticated and separately pre-trained image embedder. FormNetV2 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on FUNSD, CORD, SROIE and Payment benchmarks with a more compact model size.

2022

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FormNet: Structural Encoding beyond Sequential Modeling in Form Document Information Extraction
Chen-Yu Lee | Chun-Liang Li | Timothy Dozat | Vincent Perot | Guolong Su | Nan Hua | Joshua Ainslie | Renshen Wang | Yasuhisa Fujii | Tomas Pfister
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Sequence modeling has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on natural language and document understanding tasks. However, it is challenging to correctly serialize tokens in form-like documents in practice due to their variety of layout patterns. We propose FormNet, a structure-aware sequence model to mitigate the suboptimal serialization of forms. First, we design Rich Attention that leverages the spatial relationship between tokens in a form for more precise attention score calculation. Second, we construct Super-Tokens for each word by embedding representations from their neighboring tokens through graph convolutions. FormNet therefore explicitly recovers local syntactic information that may have been lost during serialization. In experiments, FormNet outperforms existing methods with a more compact model size and less pre-training data, establishing new state-of-the-art performance on CORD, FUNSD and Payment benchmarks.

2019

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Text Classification with Few Examples using Controlled Generalization
Abhijit Mahabal | Jason Baldridge | Burcu Karagol Ayan | Vincent Perot | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Training data for text classification is often limited in practice, especially for applications with many output classes or involving many related classification problems. This means classifiers must generalize from limited evidence, but the manner and extent of generalization is task dependent. Current practice primarily relies on pre-trained word embeddings to map words unseen in training to similar seen ones. Unfortunately, this squishes many components of meaning into highly restricted capacity. Our alternative begins with sparse pre-trained representations derived from unlabeled parsed corpora; based on the available training data, we select features that offers the relevant generalizations. This produces task-specific semantic vectors; here, we show that a feed-forward network over these vectors is especially effective in low-data scenarios, compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. By further pairing this network with a convolutional neural network, we keep this edge in low data scenarios and remain competitive when using full training sets.