Fine-Tuning Transformer Model for Invoice Recognition

Building on my recent tutorial on how to annotate PDFs and scanned images for NLP applications, we will attempt to fine-tune the recently released Microsoft's Layout LM model on an annotated custom dataset that includes French and English invoices. While the previous tutorials focused on using the publicly available FUNSD dataset to fine-tune the model, here we will show the entire process starting from annotation and pre-processing to training and inference. The LayoutLM model is based on BERT architecture but with two additional types of input embeddings. The first is a 2-D position embedding that denotes the relative position of a token within a document, and the second is an image embedding for scanned token images within a document. This model achieved new state-of-the-art results in several downstream tasks, including form understanding (from 70.72 to 79.27), receipt understanding (from 94.02 to 95.24), and document image classification (from 93.07 to 94.42).