Daily Papers

Recently, there has been a growing interest among large language model (LLM) developers in LLM-based document reading systems, which enable users to upload their own documents and pose questions related to the document contents, going beyond simple reading comprehension tasks. Consequently, these systems have been carefully designed to tackle challenges such as file parsing, metadata extraction, multi-modal information understanding and long-context reading. However, no current benchmark exists to evaluate their performance in such scenarios, where a raw file and questions are provided as input, and a corresponding response is expected as output. In this paper, we introduce DocBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLM-based document reading systems. Our benchmark involves a meticulously crafted process, including the recruitment of human annotators and the generation of synthetic questions. It includes 229 real documents and 1,102 questions, spanning across five different domains and four major types of questions. We evaluate both proprietary LLM-based systems accessible via web interfaces or APIs, and a parse-then-read pipeline employing open-source LLMs. Our evaluations reveal noticeable gaps between existing LLM-based document reading systems and human performance, underscoring the challenges of developing proficient systems. To summarize, DocBench aims to establish a standardized benchmark for evaluating LLM-based document reading systems under diverse real-world scenarios, thereby guiding future advancements in this research area.

Document parsing and recognition are fundamental capabilities for vision-language models (VLMs) and document processing systems. However, existing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document parsing benchmarks are increasingly limited in coverage and difficulty: many focus on common document genres or uniformly sampled pages where modern parsers already perform strongly, while offering limited annotation for expert-domain structures such as chemical formula, music notation, complex tables, and cross-page layouts. We introduce Dr. DocBench, a difficulty-aware benchmark for expert-level document parsing. Built from a large-scale multilingual book corpus, Dr. DocBench spans 52 BISAC subject domains and selects challenging documents through parser-failure-based sampling, targeting cases where multiple state-of-the-art systems struggle. It contains 4,514 annotated pages from long documents averaging around 100 pages, with 65k high-quality page- and block-level annotations for layout, reading order, hierarchical relations, and domain-specific visual contents. Evaluations of pipeline-based parsers and general-purpose VLMs show that strong performance on existing benchmarks does not transfer to our expert-level document parsing. Our analysis reveals substantial failures across subjects, content types, and structural attributes, highlighting Dr. DocBench as a comprehensive testbed for diagnosing and advancing document intelligence.

Real-world document tasks often ask professionals to answer questions from annual reports, regulations, clinical guidelines, and technical manuals that span hundreds or thousands of pages. Some questions also require comparing related reports. Reliable long-document understanding is therefore a prerequisite for using LLMs in compliance, clinical, financial, and engineering workflows, where decisions must be traceable to specific evidence pages and the cost of an unsupported answer is high -- yet most existing benchmarks still measure short-context or single-page QA. We introduce XL-DocBench, a fully human-verified benchmark for extra-long document understanding, with 1,519 retained questions from six professional domains and contexts up to 2,303 pages. XL-DocBench goes beyond page-level lookup. 1,103 examples (72.6\%) use multiple evidence pages. The final set also includes 556 questions (36.6\%) that use tables, charts, or figures, and 165 questions (10.9\%) that require evidence from multiple documents. Each question has one of twelve reasoning labels, expert-annotated evidence pages, a typed verification rule, and an answer format, including 218 None-answer cases. We build the benchmark with a tree-guided synthesis pipeline followed by artifact filters and full verification by 194 human experts. By coupling extra-long professional contexts with page-level evidence and typed rules, XL-DocBench fills a gap left by prior single-page, short multi-page, or text-only long-context benchmarks, and lets future work attribute system failures to retrieval, evidence use, or rule following rather than to a single leaderboard score. The results show that current systems still struggle with long contexts, multi-page evidence, and structured reasoning over professional documents.