Documents are fundamental to preserving and disseminating information, often incorporating complex layouts, tables, and charts that pose significant challenges for automatic document understanding (DU). While vision-language large models (VLLMs) have demonstrated improvements across various tasks, their effectiveness in processing long-context vision inputs remains unclear. This paper introduces WikiMixQA, a benchmark comprising 1,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) designed to evaluate cross-modal reasoning over tables and charts extracted from 4,000 Wikipedia pages spanning seven distinct topics. Unlike existing benchmarks, WikiMixQA emphasizes complex reasoning by requiring models to synthesize information from multiple modalities. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art vision-language models, revealing that while proprietary models achieve ~70% accuracy when provided with direct context, their performance deteriorates significantly when retrieval from long documents is required. Among these, GPT-4-o is the only model exceeding 50% accuracy in this setting, whereas open-source models perform considerably worse, with a maximum accuracy of 27%. These findings underscore the challenges of long-context, multi-modal reasoning and establish WikiMixQA as a crucial benchmark for advancing document understanding research.

--With recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and growing interest in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the ability to understand table structures has become increasingly important. This is especially critical in financial domains such as securities reports, where highly accurate question answering (QA) over tables is required. However, tables exist in various formats--including HTML, images, and plain text--making it difficult to preserve and extract structural information. Therefore, multimodal LLMs are essential for robust and general-purpose table understanding. Despite their promise, current Large Vision-Language Models (L VLMs), which are major representatives of multimodal LLMs, still face challenges in accurately understanding characters and their spatial relationships within documents. In this study, we propose a method to enhance L VLM-based table understanding by incorporating in-table textual content and layout features. Experimental results demonstrate that these auxiliary modalities significantly improve performance, enabling robust interpretation of complex document layouts without relying on explicitly structured input formats. The T ableCellQA dataset--including rendered images, layout (bounding-box) annotations, and QA data--will be publicly released upon publication (license confirmation in progress).

Regulatory compliance reporting in the pharmaceutical industry relies on detailed tables, but these are often under-utilized beyond compliance due to their unstructured format and arbitrary content. Extracting and semantically representing tabular data is challenging due to diverse table presentations. Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate substantial potential for semantic representation, yet they encounter challenges related to accuracy and context size limitations, which are crucial considerations for the industry applications. We introduce HySem, a pipeline that employs a novel context length optimization technique to generate accurate semantic JSON representations from HTML tables. This approach utilizes a custom fine-tuned model specifically designed for cost- and privacy-sensitive small and medium pharmaceutical enterprises. Running on commodity hardware and leveraging open-source models, our auto-correcting agents rectify both syntax and semantic errors in LLM-generated content. HySem surpasses its peer open-source models in accuracy and provides competitive performance when benchmarked against OpenAI GPT-4o and effectively addresses context length limitations, which is a crucial factor for supporting larger tables.

Table answering questions from business documents has many challenges that require understanding tabular structures, cross-document referencing, and additional numeric computations beyond simple search queries. This paper introduces a novel pipeline, named TabIQA, to answer questions about business document images. TabIQA combines state-of-the-art deep learning techniques 1) to extract table content and structural information from images and 2) to answer various questions related to numerical data, text-based information, and complex queries from structured tables. The evaluation results on VQAonBD 2023 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of TabIQA in achieving promising performance in answering table-related questions. The TabIQA repository is available at https://github.com/phucty/itabqa.